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

Enlarge / The self-portrait of Webb's mirrors is also looking very sharp thanks to the improved alignment. (credit: NASA/STScI)

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.

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