Nature Internship 2: More than a silver lining

nature_cover_0904092In my second week at Nature I’ve gotten to feel more like a member of the team, if being asked to write more and more is any measure. I’ve contributed more to news meetings, talked with my colleagues about their backgrounds and journalism plans over lunch, and begun working on an unusual feature slated to appear soon…but which will have to remain a mystery for now.

I wrote a news story about how clouds actually make the air around them brighter, a story that made made me feel better about living in Britain. I also wrote about a study in which economists were surprised to find that hormone treatment did not have an effect on how the women made economic decisions–something that recent reports hinted did happen in men.

The countries that run Antarctica are having their annual meeting in Baltimore, so I blogged about how US delegates are pushing for mandatory tourism limits. Finally, I summarized a report from entomologists who used a butterfly family tree to bolster a theory that butterflies use eyespot patterns on some parts of their wings to attract mates and patterns on other parts of their wings as camouflage from predators: [pdf].