Unprecedented. It's a word I've heard so often this year that it very nearly lost all meaning for me (maybe for you, too). But it certainly is apt when I look back on 2020 and try to describe the past 12 months in one word. (Actually, I have many other individual words to describe the year, but they're all unprintable.) So, when it came time to begin work on our biggest issue of the year, our traditional round-up of the top science stories, we made the equally unprecedented decision to devote the lion's share of space to one topic. We begin our coverage with a kind of handbook to the year of COVID-19 (page 22). How could we not? The virus has dominated virtually every aspect of our lives; science stories don't come any bigger. Indeed, some of you may wonder why we didn't simply devote the entire issue to COVID-19. We certainly could have.
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