According to a new study of Olympic athletes, about 25 percent of swimmers had verified asthma. What is odd is that it is more common in athletes from some parts of the world than others which would seem to eliminate intensity of swimmer training, or long hours spent in the water, which may expose swimmers to more chlorine byproducts  - unless Olympic swimmers in some parts of the world do not train as hard.

It could be that people with asthma self-select swimming. It could be that some have a doctor's note so they can use inhalers that are otherwise banned. 

Starbucks, the one place in the world where you can order a cup of whipped cream with a shot of caramel syrup and call it coffee, is ready to make you healthy.

Fresh off its universally applauded "Race Together" campaign, which forced the wrong advocates to get in the face of the wrong audience in the wrong venue to talk about racism in the least racist country in the world, now they want to be pushy about the amount of vegetables you're eating every day.

And they are doing it with kale. 

Evolution is messy, it happens in bursts some of the time and is painfully slow at others. On occasion, it is brilliant but sometimes, like in the human male reproductive layout, you have to wonder if it was drunk.

Dr. Carin Bondar shows both in a video about evolution, to the tune of "Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus. It is at times hilarious, poignant and informative - just like biology itself. Kudos to Carin, Emily Hammel-Brisson (vocals) and Jordan Oram (everything else) for making natural selection fun.

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