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

Enlarge / Webb's mirror self-portrait is also very sharp thanks to the improved alignment. NASA/STScI

How often does something work exactly as expected and live up to its hype? In most parts of the world, this is equivalent to coming across a unicorn holding a few winning lottery tickets between its teeth. But that pretty much describes our main science story of 2022, the successful deployment and first images of the Webb Telescope.

In fact, there was a lot of good news coming from the world of science, with a steady stream of fascinating discoveries and tantalizing potential technologies: over 200 individual articles attracted 100,000 or more readers, and the topics they addressed came from all fields of science. Of course, with a pandemic and climate change, not everything we wrote was good news. But as the best articles of the year indicate, our readers were interested in a remarkable range of topics.

10. Fauci on the rebound

For better or for worse, Anthony Fauci has become the public face of the pandemic response in the United States. Some trust him for his clear and kind advice on how to manage infection risks, and others vilify him for his advocacy of vaccinations (as well as a handful of conspiracy theories). So when Fauci himself ended up on the wrong side of risk management and contracted a SARS-CoV-2 infection, that was news too, and our pandemic specialist, Beth Mole, was here for that.

It turned out that the trajectory of her infection was a metaphor for the pandemic itself, where every silver lining seems to come with a few more gray clouds. Fauci took Paxlovid, a drug that was developed through very rapid scientific work that involved discovering the structure of viral proteins and then identifying molecules that might fit into that structure. By design, Paxlovid quickly and effectively suppresses SARS-CoV-2 infections that cause COVID-19.

But again, there are those gray clouds: after treatment ends, many people experience a flare-up of symptoms for reasons we are still investigating. And Fauci was no exception, having symptoms severe enough that he took the drug again to stop them again, even though it was not recommended by the Food and Drug Administration.

9. Fear the Magnetar

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

But in a handful of these stars, the conditions get even more extreme, because any charged particle inside the superfluidic interior can create a dynamo like the one in the Earth's core that creates our magnetic field. Except just a little louder. Well, as Paul Sutter details, 1016 times stronger. These are magnetars, a short-lived state of some neutron stars (they last about 10,000 years, which is short for astronomy).

A neutron star can kill you in many ways, given its intense gravity and tendency to emit lethal levels of radiation. But magnetars have an additional trick: they put an end to chemistry. Magnetic fields are so strong that they can distort the atomic orbitals that determine how different atoms latch onto each other to form chemical bonds. Approach within 1,000 kilometers of a magnetar, and this distortion becomes so severe that the chemical bonds no longer work. All of your atoms are free to roam as they see fit, which is generally not conducive to life.

8. The SLS: a mixed triumph?

This article was a personal rumination by Eric Berger, reflecting on the changes that have taken place at NASA and in the launch industry since he...