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 screening and Nature ran an online question-and-answer story culled from my interview.  Nature also ran a few choice quotes from the press juggernaut in the print magazine, along with an editorial, though I can’t take credit for the editorial. It’s trickier doing in-person reporting, but I really enjoy it and hope to include a little more of it in my work.

I also dashed off a quick blog on a US federal directive which halts road-building in about 50 million acres of US Forest Service land, a reversal of a Bush reversal of a Clinton rule. Not clear? Click here to read the whole thing.

Update: My interview with Jørn Hurum appeared on the Brazilian website terra.com.br on 2 June.

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.