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This was a busy year for Vice President Joe Biden: He was President Obama's point man on gun control; he traveled widely, pushing for infrastructure spending; and he recently returned form a trip to Asia, where he met with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea.

In 2014, Biden may face an even busier schedule, as he stumps for Democratic Congressional candidates in advance of November's mid-term elections and tries to decide whether to make another run for president himself.

From the start of his association with Obama, Biden made clear he didn't want a ceremonial role as vice president, but wanted to serve as a key adviser, using his wide-ranging experience as a 36-year veteran of the Senate.

Ted Kaufman was Biden's chief of staff for many years, and even his temporary successor in the Senate. He says Biden's role has worked well for both the vice president and Obama.

"I think the plan that he and the president came up with originally is really playing out, and that was, when the president asked him to run, that he would be the last person talking to the president," Kaufman says. "That's worked out very well. It's worked out well for the president, it's worked out for him."

But not everything worked out for Biden or the president this year. Biden's highest profile assignment was leading the administration's effort to win new restrictions on gun purchases in the wake of last December's shootings in Newtown, Conn.

The measure failed in the Senate, but Biden vowed to press on.

More On Biden's Future

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Joe Biden, Congratulator In Chief

It felt like a dream.

The Marines kept flying over us all night long. Their hulking C-130 cargo planes rattled the tarp we'd jerry-rigged above our heads. NPR photographer David Gilkey and I were lying in sleeping bags next to the runway of the destroyed Tacloban airport. We'd arrived a few hours earlier in the back of one of those military aircraft. Now we were just waiting for day break.

Typhoon Haiyan had ripped the airport apart, killed the soldiers based there and left it flooded with seawater. At this point the airport was a make-shift staging area for a relief operation that hadn't yet found its stride.

"This is bizarre," was David's summation of the scene. Filipino soldiers slept in helicopters next to us. American soldiers drifted in and out of the darkness. Black and white 50-gallon drums of jet fuel were strewn across the field around our tent. Refugees huddled by the remnants of the terminal hoping to get airlifted to Manila.

Typhoon Haiyan Devastates The Philippines

What I Saw: A Photographer's Last Dispatch From The Philippines

It's not been a good year for Florida's citrus industry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that, for the second year running, the orange crop is expected to be almost 10 percent lower than the previous year.

The culprit is citrus greening — a disease that has devastated Florida's oranges and grapefruits and has now begun to spread in Texas and California.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, the Florida Citrus Tower was one of the Orlando area's most important tourist attractions.

"You could go up and see thousands and thousands acres of trees," says citrus grower Benny McLean. "And you could buy fresh-squeezed orange juice or you could buy a bag of navels. So it was a big deal back then."

It all ended with a series of freezes in the 1980s that devastated citrus in central Florida. In the '83 freeze, 300,000 acres of mature, fruit bearing orange and grapefruit trees died in a single night. Growers eventually recovered by moving and replanting groves further south.

Citrus greening poses a similar crisis for growers, but one for which so far, there is no solution.

"I can't imagine Florida without commercial citrus," says Harold Browning, director of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, an industry group that is focused almost entirely on one problem: defeating citrus greening.

Science

New Bugs In Florida Stymie Researchers, Threaten Crops

As we close out 2013, we're returning to some of the year's films that were "inspired by a true story" and taking a look at the true-to-inspired ratio. Turns out, 42 — a biopic that portrays Jackie Robinson's 1947 integration of Major League Baseball — gets a lot of things right.

Arnold Rampersad, a professor of English at Stanford University who wrote a biography of Robinson, says the film really rings true.

"Fundamentally, the story is accurate, in my estimation," he tells NPR's Robert Siegel.