Featured Links - January 4, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Tea Sea on New Year's Day 

• Three years on, the pandemic — and our response — have been jolting. "Here’s what even the experts didn’t see coming." By Helen Branswell, who is always worth reading.
• 22 Things That Made the World a Better Place in 2022. "From spinal implants that allow paralyzed people to walk to smashing an asteroid off course with a rocket, this wasn’t just a year of negative headlines."
• The top science stories of 2022. "NASA nudges an asteroid, weird things emerge from water, and scientists tackle a new epidemic."
• Snow Crash: the 30-year-old novel that predicted today’s twisted Metaverse. "Prophetic sci-fi author Neal Stephenson tells Dazed what his seminal story got right and wrong about today’s terminally online world."
• The Best News Bloopers of 2022. Some light humour to start the year.
• Time for a pharmacology tweetorial (of sorts) on one-eyed sheep. "It’s an odyssey that began on Idaho ranches in the 1950s and ended over half a century later with the approval of several new cancer drugs for basal cell carcinoma and AML." This is a fascinating story that illustrates the roundabout way that scientific research sometimes takes to deliver results. 
• The sci-fi and fantasy books I'm looking forward to in 2023. "19 new reads to read this coming year" by Andrew Liptak.
• The Year Ahead in Energy. "In 2023 we will see the first real movement in a global energy transition—and will hit lots of bumps in the road along the way."