Nature Internship 9: Twittering Apollo

apollo-plus-40I’ve been surprisingly absorbed by the task of writing 140-character Tweets recapping the Apollo XI lunar landing. The project, roughly timed to mimic the mission on a 40-year delay, has had a very encouraging response so far! I also got roped into writing a landing page and timeline for Nature’s online special commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo program.  It’s  been a great excuse to revisit books I read about Apollo when I was a kid and to check out new sources of Apollo history.

I’ve continued to follow the battles between chiropractors and watchdogs provoked by the Simon Singh libel case (here, here, and here). Reporting on this case and that of the Ida fossil have been really instructive–I’d rarely followed the same news story for very long before. I aim to do more of that when I return to freelancing next week.

Finally, I wrote a quick blog post about how Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus invented the index card to help him keep track of all the animal and plant species he was classifying.