If you love science, but your quest for knowledge runs deeper than the “I Fucking Love Science” drivel your friends post on Facebook, then you might find Edge.org’s Annual Question feature of interest. This year’s question was What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news? what makes it important? Here you’ll find thought-provoking gems like Matt Ridley’s The Epidemic Of Absence, in which Ridley references Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s book of the same name, and points out that we could easily do away with hayfever, if only we didn’t hate eating worms so much. Or Robert Sapolsky’s Collective Realization—We May All Die Horribly,  which examines how we should probably get more comfortable with the fact that science is the only thing keeping us all from dying of Ebola. So okay, to be honest, maybe these articles are just oblique shilling for a bunch of science writers’ books or other publications, but with 194 contributors, there’s still some interesting reading.

Overlooked In 2015

We must confess that we were a little disappointed at the omission of a couple of other science works from last year, specifically the Study of Maternal and Child Kissing (SMACK) Working Group’s Maternal kisses are not effective in alleviating minor childhood injuries (boo-boos): a randomized, controlled and blinded study, and Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth, which suggests that cussin’ like a sailor may actually indicate a higher level of intelligence.

Previous Years’ Questions

Many of Edge.org’s previous collections are available in book form:

Any of which should all be a bit more thought provoking than an Insane Clown Posse video…