#1 Dava Sobel The Planets IPY joined in progress UAF

.davasobel.com I have spent my entire professional life writing. Beginning fresh out of college as a technical writer for IBM, I moved quickly into journalism in January of 1970, just in time for the first Earth Day. My two all-time favorite full-time jobs were as science writer for the Cornell University News Bureau, where my beat included everything from astronomy to veterinary medicine, and staff reporter in the Science News department of The New York Times, covering psychology and psychiatry. My most unforgettable assignment at the Times required me to live 25 days as a research subject in a "chronophysiology" laboratory, where the boarded-up windows and specially trained technicians kept me from knowing whether it was day outside or night.

For twenty years I wrote freelance for numerous magazines, most notably Harvard Magazine, Omni, Science Digest, and Discover, as well as Audubon, Life, and The New Yorker. I saw my first total solar eclipse in 1991, as a columnist with Travel Holiday, and attended Space Camp for an article in a retirement magazine called New Choices.

I was born in 1947 in the Bronx, right near the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden, so that I could walk to either by myself from an early age. My best academic credential is undoubtedly my diploma from the Bronx High School of Science (class of 1964). My home life, too, provided excellent career preparation, since my mother had trained as a chemist, and no one in my family thought it odd or unusual for a girl to be interested in science. Both my parents loved to read, convincing me by their behavior that the best way to hold someone's attention was with a book.

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[mtcav]

Cool! I once made a solar system! I populated one of the planets with albinos. Then I pushed the sun slowly towards their planet. They were soooo bummed out! LOL