Commercial beekeeper Lee Townsend of metropolitan Edmonton found out Club Sierra - I mean Sierra Club (if you've been to their offices you know why it is easy to conflate the two) - was stopping by on its “Protect the Pollinators Tour“.

He wanted to know their thoughts on pollinator awareness so he stopped in. The scientist speaking was not an expert on bees but checked off the correct neutral boxes ('complex issue', 'multi-factorial') but it was Sierra Club of Canada Executive Director John Bennett would really got him wound up.

National Geographic got some attention for comparing global warming denier to anti-vaxxers, moon landing conspiracy theorists and the followers of Brother John Birch who are against water fluoridation.

There were objections to the characterization. Science Left Behind showed that not only were the anti-vaccine, anti-energy and anti-food beliefs dominated by the left-wing political demographic and partisans immediately scrambled to show those were all bipartisan. 

The International Astronomical Union has been critical of groups that allow you to name asteroids or planets, insisting that it was only their realm as self-appointed gatekeepers.

Now they seem to have changed their minds and recognize that getting the public involved is the only way the public will care - people like cute robots on Mars because NASA makes them feel involved. Ironically, the IAU are doing it with the planet that got the public most dismissive of the IAU - Pluto, where 237 members outvoted a few others and decided was not a planet at all before it became one of about 50,000 dwarf planets.

Michael Hofmann Winer just won a $150,000 first-place prize for innovation, based on quantum condensed matter physics work he did in collaboration with U-Md. physics professor Victor Galitski and graduate student Justin Wilson - and he hasn't finished high school yet.

Winer is the winner of this year's Intel Science Talent Search. Obviously he did a lot of work but he also credits the math, science and computer science magnet program at Montgomery Blair, as well as teacher James R. Schafer, whom he called “one of the best teachers in the universe.”

Do you want to inhale your whisky rather than drink it, or maybe print a smell? Harvard professor David Edwards can make it happen.

More intriguingly, he has created an edible skin meant to replace traditional food packaging, as part of his Wikifoods effort.  Skin on ice cream sounds kind of gross, except an apple has skin, a banana has a skin, an orange has a skin. He is just replacing regular packaging with an edible container.

If you make an arbitrary decision not to vaccinate your child, and a bunch of people get sick, should you go to jail, just like if you starve a child or let them live in feces?

Science media is a tough place to be independent and it just got tougher. Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the part of the family company that owns Nature and Scientific American and others, with  Springer Science+Business Media, investment banked by BC Partners. Macmillan Science and Education, namely Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and the global businesses of Macmillan Education will all be under the same banner.

Real Clear Science editors curate science stories from all over the world so they read outside the lines of corporate or government-controlled science media. 

That means they are going to find things we may not find on our own. 

To close out 2014, editors collated the most intriguing articles, on everything from ball lightning to DNA, and gathered them into one piece. So you won't have to read for 365 days to learn what happened, you can read for one.

Top 10 Science Stories of 2014

California is no stranger to anti-science beliefs; from anti-vaccine to anti-agriculture to anti-energy, you can stick a pin in a map of the coast and find alarmingly one-sided views on politics, medicine and science.