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Chelsea Wald
Vienna, Austria
Chelsea Wald is a freelance science writer and editor.
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Me, too, Regan! Another thing that I sometimes miss as a freelancer is working with people in person. What a great pleasure teamwork can be.
I was a scientist (OK, maybe more like a lab assistant) for 10 days
Some of the fellows (from both the biomedical and environment tracks) on a field trip in Cape Cod. (Credit: Diana Kenney) I loved school. That's one reason why I became a science journalist--so I could keep learning a wide variety of new things at a breakneck pace. And I do! But school was so...
Thanks for the comment, John. I was contemplating why this particular scene bothered me so much when there were several other problems with the science in the film (for example, the fudged orbits of various space objects and the extreme unlikelihood that someone could use a fire extinguisher as a makeshift jetpack). I decided that I didn't much mind it when they used questionable physics to save someone's life, but I really hated it when they used it to KILL someone. It made Clooney's character's death seem completely contrived. Nonetheless, I'm happy I didn't turn it off, because it pulled me back in pretty quickly. The reentry scene at the end is particularly stunning.
How I would fix that scene in Gravity with the questionable physics
I know I’m late to the party, but I finally saw Alfonso Cuarón’s space movie Gravity last night. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson and nearly everyone else, I really enjoyed it. That’s why it’s gnawing on me that a pivotal scene relied on some dubious physics. It’s the one in the promotional image to th...
Ha, I thought about Felix when I wrote this. Oh, and the new class of US astronauts is indeed 50 percent women. First time ever: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/06/17/new-astronaut-class-begins-its-journey.
Astronaut or cosmonaut? Just don't call her a "space woman."
As we walked to Vienna's Natural History Museum for the panel celebrating 50 years of women in space, my husband and I chatted idly about the terms astronaut and cosmonaut. How strange, we thought, that there should be a word that means "person who went into space with the American space progr...
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Dec 7, 2009
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