Science round-up 2008

From protecting our genetic information from discrimination to constructing an entire bacterial genome from scratch, here’s a round-up of the top stories in science and medicine for 2008:

Science Magazine names Reprogramming Cells the “Breakthrough of the year”; exoplanets & cancer genes make runners-up.

The NIH open access policy and GINA get a mention in Rick Weiss’s Top 8 Science Policy News Stories of 2008 at ScienceProgress.org.

Time Magazine went whole hog with it’s Top 10 of Everything, but we’re more interested in their Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs and Top 10 Scientific Discoveries.

Amazon editors selected Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin the best science book of 2008. Customers used their wallets to push My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor above Shubin; Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach sounds pretty interesting as well. (2008 was also the year of the colon, apparently.)

For you skeptics out there, The Quakometer offers his take on the best books about quackery, scepticism, complementary and alternative medicine and its effects on society for 2008.