Andrew May

The possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos is one of the most profound subjects that human beings can ponder. Astrophysicist Andrew May gives an expert overview of our current state of knowledge, looking at how life started on Earth, and the tell-tale “signatures” it produces....

Four decades after Viking and almost half a century after Apollo, technology has improved beyond recognition - as has politics. As private ventures like SpaceX seize center stage from NASA, Mars has undergone a seismic shift....

Over 50 years ago, astronomers launched the world's first orbiting telescope. This allowed them to gaze further into outer space and examine anything that appears in the sky above our heads, from comets and planets to galaxy clusters and stars. Since then, almost 100 space telescopes have been...

Aliens, flying saucers, ESP, the Bermuda Triangle, antigravity…are we talking about science fiction or pseudoscience? Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference. Both pseudoscience and science fiction (SF) are creative endeavors that have little in common with academic science, beyond...

The Cold War saw scientists in East and West racing to create amazing new technologies, the like of which the world had never seen. Yet not everyone was taken by surprise. From super-powerful atomic weapons to rockets and space travel, readers of science fiction (SF) had seen it all before...

Even before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, private companies were exploiting space via communication satellites - a sector that is seeing exponential growth in the internet age. In human spaceflight, too, commercialization is making itself felt. Billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos...

Astrophysicist and science writer Andrew May disentangles fact from fiction in this fast-moving and entertaining account, covering the nature and history of comets and asteroids, the reason why some orbits are more hazardous than others, and more....

People are used to seeing "fake physics" in science fiction - concepts like faster-than-light travel, antigravity, and time travel, to name a few. The fiction label ought to be a giveaway, but some SF writers - especially those with a background in professional science - are so adept at...