Nature Internship 6: Ida

nature_cover_090521This 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.