Mars is back. Suddenly everyone – from Elon Musk to Ridley Scott to Donald Trump – is talking about going to the Red Planet.When the Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon in 1969, many people imagined Mars would be next. However NASA's Viking 1, which landed in 1976, was just a robot. The much-anticipated crewed mission failed to materialise, defeated by a combination of technological and political challenges.Four decades after Viking and almost half a century after Apollo tec...

Over 50 years ago, astronomers launched the world's first orbiting telescope to gaze further into outer space to 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 launched from Earth and are orbiting our planet, with 26 still active and relaying information back to us.As a result of these space-based instruments, such as NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope, we know much ...

Extraterrestrial life is a common theme inscience fiction, but is it a serious prospect in the real world? Astrobiologyis the emerging field of science that seeks to answer this question.The possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmosis one of the most profound subjects that human beings can ponder. AstrophysicistAndrew May gives an expert overview of our current state of knowledge, lookingat how life started on Earth, the tell-tale 'signatures' it...

As end-of-the-world scenarios go, an apocalyptic collision with anasteroid or comet is the new kid on the block, gaining respectability only inthe last decade of the 20th century with the realisation that the dinosaurs hadbeen wiped out by just such an impact.Now the science community is making up for lost time, withworldwide efforts to track the thousands of potentially hazardous near-Earthobjects, and plans for high-tech hardwar...

**Dreams, schemes and opportunity as space opens for tourism and commerce.Twentieth century space exploration may have belonged to state-funded giants such as NASA, but there is a parallel history which has set the template for the future.**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, commercialisation is making itsel...

When the amphibious Duplex Drive (DD) Sherman tanks of the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (QMO) touched down on the sand of Sword Beach as the vanguard of the D-Day invasion, ahead of the infantry and Commandos, it was the culmination of an evolution spanning several years. Switching roles from a mounted regiment in India, into a mechanized, armored cavalry regiment, they fought in France in 1940, then faced an uncertain future, after evacuating through Dunkirk. However, the 13th/18th would subse...

There is a huge gulf between the real physics of space travel and the way it is commonly portrayed in movies and TV shows. That’s not because space physics is difficult or obscure – most of the details were understood by the end of the 18th century – but because it can often be bafflingly counter-intuitive for a general audience. The purpose of this book isn’t to criticize or debunk popular sci-fi depictions, which can be very entertaining, but to focus on how space physics really works. T...

The idea of using a large gun to send humans into space is as impossible today as it was a century and a half ago, when Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Yet he went to great lengths to persuade readers it wasn't impossible - not through arm-waving and made-up technobabble, but using real physics and astronomy. No one had done anything like that in fiction before - and even today it's unusual to see so much "real science" discussed in a work of science ficti...

The 20th century saw radical changes in the way serious music is composed and produced, including the advent of electronic instruments and novel compositional methods such as serialism and stochastic music. Unlike previous artistic revolutions, this one took its cues from the world of science.Creating electronic sounds, in the early days, required a well-equipped laboratory and an understanding of acoustic theory. Composition became increasingly “algorithmic”, with many composers e...

Music is shaped by the science of sound.How can music - an artform - have anything to do with science? Yet there are myriad ways in which the two are intertwined, from the basics of music theory and the design of instruments to hi-fi systems and how the brain processes music.Science writer Andrew May traces the surprising connections between science and music, from the theory of sound waves to the way musicians use mathematical algorithms to create music.

When a group of tourists disappears on a visit to Stonehenge, the police suspect a publicity stunt. But Professor Henry Vaughan, head of Gnostic Theology at Oxford University, knows better. A crack has appeared in reality, and a cosmic crisis is looming! Vaughan embarks on a frantic quest as powerful forces close in. He takes a vital piece of evidence—the Aquarius Code—and goes on the run. With him is Ruth Totton, the only witness to what really happened. As their desperate search leads th...

Planet Earth is a constituent part of the Galaxy, but only a microscopically small part—a tiny chunk of rock. Like Prometheus, we are chained to this rock, and constrained to view the Galaxy from this one perspective only. Why should we be interested in the Galaxy in the first place, and—with such a restricted viewpoint—how can we ever hope to learn anything about it? These questions are addressed in this book, which draws on an eclectic heritage of science, philosophy, mysticism, poetry a...