Where 2022’s news was (mostly) good: The year’s top science stories

How often does something work exactly as planned, and live up to its hype? In most of the world, that’s the equivalent of stumbling across a unicorn that’s holding a few winning lottery tickets in its teeth. But that pretty much describes our top science story of 2022, the successful deployment and initial images from the Webb Telescope.

In fact, there was lots of good news to come out of the world of science, with a steady flow of fascinating discoveries and tantalizing potential tech—over 200 individual articles drew in 100,000 readers or more, and the topics they covered came from all areas of science. Of course, with a pandemic and climate change happening, not everything we wrote was good news. But as the top stories of the year indicate, our readers found interest in a remarkable range of topics.

For better and worse, Anthony Fauci has become the public face of the pandemic response in the US. He’s trusted by some for his personable, plain-spoken advice regarding how to manage the risks of infection—and vilified by others for his advocacy of vaccinations (plus a handful of conspiracy theories). So, when Fauci himself ended up on the wrong end of risk management and got a SARS-CoV-2 infection, that was news as well, and our pandemic specialist, Beth Mole, was there for it.

It turned out the trajectory of his infection was a metaphor for the pandemic itself, where every silver lining seems to be delivered with a few additional gray clouds. Fauci took Paxlovid, a drug that was developed due to some very rapid scientific work that involved finding out the structure of viral proteins and then identifying molecules that could fit into that structure. As a result of its design, Paxlovid rapidly and effectively suppresses the SARS-CoV-2 infections that cause COVID-19.

But once again, there are those gray clouds: once the treatment course runs out, many people experience a rebound of symptoms for reasons we’re still working out. And Fauci was no exception, having symptoms severe enough that he went back on the drug to shut them down again—even though that’s not been recommended by the Food and Drug Administration.

Neutron stars are probably the most extreme objects in the Universe (black holes being more of an aberration in spacetime than an object, per se). They’re places where the tallest “mountains” are less than a millimeter, and cracks in the crust can create violent bursts of radiation. They’re also places where the interior is a superfluid of rapidly circulating subatomic particles.

But in a handful of these stars, conditions get even more extreme, as any charged particles in the superfluidic interior can create a dynamo like the one in the Earth’s core that creates our magnetic field. Except just a bit stronger. Well, as Paul Sutter details it, 10¹⁶ times stronger. These are the magnetars, a short-lived…