Many of our readers' favorite Wired Science posts each year are image galleries. These collections of visually interesting subjects are a great way for us to put the news in a broader context, or to get away from the daily news cycle and explore topics we find intriguing in a different way.

Usually these stories are driven by the images, but sometimes the images are there to add another dimension to the story. Either way, we love putting them together, and our readers apparently love to read them. To help you get the new year started with a great procrastination opportunity, we've collected our most popular galleries of 2011.

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It turns out that our readers have strong opinions about which equations true geeks need to know, or at least feign knowledge of. When we published this collection of some of our favorite equations, which landed at the top of the list of most popular Wired Science galleries for the year, the reactions were plentiful and opinionated. So we followed up with a list of readers' picks, which in turn provoked another round of opinions (many of which comically complained this list was missing equations that were in our original collection).

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