Not done with looking back at 2012 and forward to 2013

I have taken care of the situation I described in the Hipcrime Vocab: Kunstler Victory Lap?

I have a new computer, which means I don't have access to the free HTML editor and all the files saved to it until I transfer the program over to the new hard drive.

I've downloaded and installed a copy of that editor to the new computer, so I don't have to confine myself to reblogging posts from the Hipcrime Vocab.*  Instead, I'm going to point out that I have more to add to the 2012 science year in review thanks to stories I included in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Fiscal Bluff Bungee Jumping) on Daily Kos.

Discovery News on YouTube: Top 5 Science Stories of 2012

Top 5 Science Stories of 2012! Trace counts down the biggest stories in a year full of amazing scientific advancements and achievements.

Discovery News on YouTube: Top 6 Science Books of 2012

What were some of the best science books of 2012? Anthony asks io9's Esther Inglis-Arkell about her top reads this past year.

Discovery News: Reader's Choice: Favorite Space Story of 2012

As 2012 rolls to a close, we can look back at an incredible 12 months of space exploration. Could this be one of the most profound years in space history? It might just be, but as we throw out our old calendars and replace them with ones marked "2013" (while avoiding doomsday in the process)* we look forward to another groundbreaking year in space that (who knows?) might be even more historic.

So here are the top 10 space stories as chosen by our readers. Over 30 nominations were rounded up by Discovery News writers, bloggers and editorial staff, and the final 10 were voted on and ranked by you via Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Here they are in descending order, counting down to #1, the favorite space story of the year.

And so we begin, on Mars, in 1976...

*(This will be the ONLY reference to the idiotic "Maya doomsday" pseudoscience that plagued an otherwise outstanding year of real science!)

Speaking of the Fake Mayan Doomsday, NBC News has the story.

2012's Maya non-apocalypse takes the grand prize for weird science
By Alan Boyle

The hype over last month's supposed Maya doomsday has won honors as the weirdest science story of the past year — and although there wasn't all that much science to the claim that the ancient culture's calendar foretold the end of the world, the whole episode was a classic example of people putting too much faith in way-out calculations.

"A year before that, we gave one of our prizes to a whole bunch of people who made specific prediction about when the world would end," said Marc Abrahams, who heads up the Ig Nobel Prize program for silly science. The big lesson? "When you make mathematical calculations, you should check your assumptions," Abrahams told me.

As you can see, I wasn't done with the Fake Mayan Doomsday, either.  At least it got the kind of recognition it deserved.

I'm also not done with looking forward to in 2013 as this video from Discovery News on YouTube demonstrates.

3 Incredible Science Breakthroughs for 2013

What will 2013 hold in the world of science? Anthony explores some of the awesome upcoming events and advancements that lie in store for us.

Don't underestimate the importance of the DSM-V for mental health diagnosis and especially treatment.  Some well-known disorders, such as Asperger's Syndrome, will be defined away or lumped in with other mental conditions.  That makes accomodating people who are recognized now a lot more difficult, if not impossible.

*I will do it from time to time, but in the way I've done it before, by quoting the relevant passages in a post I've composed offline in the HTML editor, not by using the reblogger function of Blogspot.  That's a lazy stopgap.