I completed my reporting internship with Nature near the end of June. My final work on staff there included recording a news chat for the weekly podcast about the ApolloPlus40 Twitter project I mentioned in my last post. I also discussed an ancient bone flute found in Germany. You can download the newschat here [mp3, [...]

I’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 [...]

I covered monkey business of several types this week. First, I wrote a news story about Simon Singh, who announced that he hopes to appeal a judge’s ruling in a libel case about chiropractic. He and his supporters are also campaigning to limit the influence of English libel laws on public science-related debates. I also [...]

Thanks to Ida the fossil primate I got out of the office last week, on Tuesday to see a screening of the documentary about Ida at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and on Wednesday to interview Ida’s other half Jørn Hurum at the studio that produced the film. I blogged about the [...]

Jørn Hurum has accompanied the fossilized primate he nicknamed Ida on a world tour to fame and notoriety in the last week. The 47-million-year-old fossil is famous for its haunting completeness — the outlines of its fur and its last meal appear like a shadow around the intact skeleton. Yet Hurum has drawn fire for [...]

This week my work, like much of the science media world, was dominated by a 47-million-year-old fossilized primate nicknamed Ida. It is an exciting find, primarily because of its completeness, and it’s gotten a lot of attention. I wrote a pair of blog posts on Monday and Wednesday sandwiching the actual news story I wrote [...]

Palaeontologists have identified a new species of primate by putting together two halves of an unusually complete fossil, which were separated for decades by the vagaries of the fossil trade. One half of the fossil — which some media reports have been quick to label ‘the missing link’ — was even doctored by a past [...]

Handle money often? It might help you tolerate pain, according to psychologists who found that volunteers who handled bills or even just thought about money were better at handling social rejection and physical pain than those who thought about neutral topics. I wrote a news story about the study this week. I also wrote about [...]

Handling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese and American psychologists. But remembering cash one has spent intensifies both types of hurt. The findings suggest that the mere thought of having money makes people feel physically stronger and less dependent on [...]

A real-life network of scientists, policymakers and journalists linked to stem cell research recently found itself cloned on social networking site Facebook. The originals had no control over the profiles, which used their names and photos and which hijacked their real friends in what’s called a sybil attack. Find out more in my news story, [...]