In choosing the top articles of any year, there are always a few knobs to turn. A top article traffic-wise, for example, could be one from a prior year, since we have articles with millions of readers, and since we carry some press release stuff it could be one of those, and one person may have two.

And since Science 2.0 is all member-driven, no employees or corporate or government overlord, the people who might pick the candidates would most likely be the most active, and therefore one of the candidates. So instead we take it out of anyone's hands and just went by number of readers (not number of pageviews, since a controversial article can generate a lot more of those). And only one per author. And only 5 since, really, no one is reading 10 articles on a list.

PORTLAND, Ore. - The out-of-hospital birth setting in Oregon was associated with a higher risk of perinatal death, while the in-hospital birth setting was associated with a higher risk for cesarean delivery and other obstetric interventions (e.g., induction or augmentation of labor), according a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University.

I almost feel badly for continuing to pick on Chipotle. The company has been supernaturally inept this year. They can do nothing right. They may not even be able to make gravity work anymore.
Yet, they are so smug, and transparently phony that it is difficult to refrain from kicking them when they are down, as in "keep down"—something their patrons are having trouble doing with their lunch.

It is ironic that most of their problems began when they hopped on the phony anti-GMO express. I guess it seemed like a good corporate maneuver at the time, but I think they picked the wrong train:

The Kraken is perhaps the largest monster ever imagined by mankind. In Nordic folklore, it was said to haunt the seas from Norway through Iceland and all the way to Greenland.

The Kraken had a knack for harassing ships and many pseudoscientific reports (including official naval ones) said it would attack vessels with its strong arms. If this strategy failed, the beast would start swimming in circles around the ship, creating a fierce maelstrom to drag the vessel down.

The gas boom brought about primarily by hydraulic fracturing has lowered the domestic price of natural gas so that the United States now has among the lowest prices in the world, and it has shifted the U.S. from a significant importer to a potential exporter of liquefied natural gas. This benefits consumers and led to gains in competitiveness for U.S. manufacturers, something desperately needed for the moribund U.S. economy.

But there is a conflict in the Obama administration. He signed an agreement to allow exports while simultaneously instructing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to restrict fossil fuels so that his subsidies for solar power companies don't fare even worse than they have.

MINNEAPOLIS - Taking a high dose of vitamin D3 is safe for people with multiple sclerosis (MS) and may correct the body's hyperactive immune response, according to a study published in the Dece. 30, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Low levels of vitamin D in the blood are tied to an increased risk of developing MS. People who have MS and low levels of vitamin D are more likely to have greater disability and more disease activity.

Recurrence of HER2-positive breast cancer after treatment may be due to a specific and possibly cancer-induced weakness in the patient's immune system -- a weakness that in principle could be corrected with a HER2-targeted vaccine -- according to a new study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

While hospitals have made strides in reducing the time it takes to treat heart attack patients once they arrive at the hospital, patient delays recognizing symptoms and seeking treatment are associated with increased damage to the heart, according to a study published online today in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.

Nearly 25 percent of all teens reported being involved in a physical fight in the past year, with higher rates of violent altercations among African-American and Latin-American adolescents than European-American ones.

To find out why, scholars writing in the Journal of Child and Family Studies conducted focus groups with African American and Latino parents regarding teen violence. Result: addressing the parents' attitudes about fighting, involving them in violence prevention programs and tailoring programs to different racial/ethnic groups may improve the effectiveness of prevention programs.

A majority of Americans, 54 percent, say it can be necessary for the government to sacrifice freedoms to fight terrorism.

About 50 percent of Americans think it is acceptable to allow warrantless government analysis of Internet activities and communications--even of American citizens--in order to keep an eye out for suspicious activity, only about 30 percent are against this type of government investigation.