Escape the Flu This Season

It's enough to make the hypochondriac in all of us squirm

(NEWSER) - The trash smells worse than the kitchen sinks, but it's not necessarily less prone to germs. Health gives you the 12 germiest places:

1. Kitchen sink and counters—Use antibacterial product.
2. Airplane bathrooms—Flushing sprays germs everywhere.
3. Wet laundry—E. coli, courtesy dirty skivvies. Use bleach, dry high heat.
4. Public drinking fountains—Up to 2.7 million bacteria per square inch.

Medicine marches on, leaving behind some ailments that defy understanding

(NEWSER) - Doctors have successfully performed a face transplant, but the cure for the common cold still eludes them. LiveScience ponders the diseases that got away.

1. AIDS
2. Alzheimer's disease
3. The common cold

New year, new trends

(NEWSER) - If your New Year's Resolution is to "be more adventurous," this is the list for you. Writing for Time , Josh Ozersky lays out the five foods that he predicts will be hot in 2012, while admitting that these forecasts are typically "about as reliable as the photos on a Latvian dating site." That's because food writers consistently overestimate how much Americans will glom on to ethnic foods—Peruvian food hasn't exactly taken the country by storm, he notes. But "that doesn’t mean that things aren’t changing," writes Ozersky, who presents a pretty exotic list:

1. Banh Mi: If you want to seem adventurous without actually having to be adventurous, these Vietnamese sandwiches (pronounced bon-mee) are for you. They're basically "crispy French bread filled with fresh, bright, firm vegetables, hot sauce, and what usually looks like six different kinds of pork."

End-of-year lists brings out the worst in Internet comments: Linda Holmes

(NEWSER) - As the end of the year approaches, bloggers, journalists, and other writers whip up plenty of end-of-year, top-whatever list. NPR's Linda Holmes creates a list of her own: a look at 20 of the less-than-merry folks who frequent the comment sections of those lists:

• The guy who is 100% right: He's the one who will snipe that your "list of things you thought were good is just your opinion."

...the killing of Osama bin Laden, says AP poll

(NEWSER) - Between the protests, the natural disasters, and the economy, it was quite the newsy year. So which story was the top dog? The killing of Osama bin Laden takes the No. 1 slot, according to the AP's yearly poll of US editors and news directors. Of the 247 ballots cast, the death of the al-Qaeda leader at the hands of Navy SEALs received 128 first-place votes. The remainder of the top 10:

2. Japan's "triple disaster": the 9.0-magnitude earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear crisis
3. Arab Spring uprisings: from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Syria