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 on Tuesday. If you only read one, I’d recommend the Wednesday blog post.
I also wrote a news story about how neither the sky nor GPS as we know it are falling, but there’s a growing chance that the GPS signal many scientists rely on may drop in quality during the next few years. That story was a good learning experience: my editor and I spent a while negotiating the headline and first sentence, which I thought didn’t really represent the cautionary note I thought the rest of the story struck. But I’m learning to choose my battles and cooperate with colleagues, I hope.
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 an astronomer who thinks he knows why hundreds of naked-eye observers have seen long-lasting flashes of light on the moon. Columbia grad student Cameron Hummels mentioned this research to me when I was profiling him for Science Careers this winter–it was fun to follow up on the tip and turn it into a story.
Not long after my Alpine ski tour (sadly not part of my work for Nature), I attended a Microsoft Research demonstration day in Cambridge where I played with futuristic gadgets and spoke with researchers working in everything from computational biology to 3-d visualization hardware. I also finally met one of the engineers behind SenseCam, who was out of town when I reported on the device for Science in March.
And back at the office, I’ve blogged about some look-alike journals produced by Elsevier on behalf of drugmaker Merck (here and here), the FDA’s accusations that Cheerios has mislabeled its cereal, and a possible nomination to fill the empty NASA administrator role.
Update: My story about money and pain appeared in the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación [html] [pdf-like format] on 1 June.
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, online ahead of next week’s print edition.
A former NASA collaborator has just published a new analysis of his copy of Apollo-era data–NASA lost the originals–from a lunar dust experiment. I reported in an online news story that NASA archivists are trying to recover other Apollo data, too, in advance of the next moon missions.
Earthquake scientists have created some pretty awesome -looking images of the Italian region hit by an earthquake earlier this month. Nature printed [html] one this week, based on my blog post last week. I also blogged about animal researchers who protested violence against them at UCLA and about a TV documentary on controversial human cloning attempts. And while I was covering controversy, I blogged about allegations that Jared Diamond defamed a pair of feuding New Guinean men in a New Yorker article.
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 on Tuesday. If you only read one, I’d recommend the Wednesday blog post.
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 
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