Another year, another 3 cover features

How It Works covers 2024

I’ve been writing regularly for How It Works magazine for over 5 years now, with at least one article in every issue this year. As last year, I’ve managed three cover features in 2024, as pictured above. Here’s a quick rundown of them:

  • Time (issue 187, February) – the history of timekeeping from the Antikythera mechanism to atomic clocks, together with a bit of relativistic theory on time dilation and spacetime
     
  • The Science of Eclipses (issue 188, March) – with a particular focus on the much-publicized 2024 solar eclipse, as well as ESA’s much less widely reported Proba-3 “artificial eclipse” mission, also launched in 2024
     
  • Quantum Physics Explained (issue 197, December) – covering all those things that used to give me nightmares as an undergraduate, such as the double-slit experiment, Schrodinger’s cat and the uncertainty principle, as well as newer developments like quantum teleportation and quantum-dot displays
     

Space Telescopes – book and Guardian article

Space telescopes book

I’m very pleased that yesterday’s Observer newspaper featured an article by me about space telescopes, which is now free to read – under the title Cosmic Time Machines – on the Guardian website. That’s one of the most prestigious mainstream news sites here in the UK, so hopefully I’ll reach a wider-than-usual audience with it.

The article ties in with my latest book, Eyes in the Sky, which was published last month by Icon Books. As with my previous books for them, it’s part of their “Hot Science” series – actually my 6th contribution to it. Here’s their blurb from the back cover of Eyes in the Sky:

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 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 more about the universe than we did half a century ago. But why is Hubble, orbiting just 540 kilometres above the Earth, so much more effective than a ground-based telescope? How can a glorified camera tell us not only what distant objects look like, but their detailed chemical composition and three-dimensional structure as well?

In Eyes in the Sky, science writer Andrew May takes us on a journey into space to answer these questions and more. Looking at the development of revolutionary instruments, such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, May explores how such technology has helped us understand the evolution of the Universe.

Three More Cover Features

Three issues of How It Works magazine

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had three consecutive cover features in How It Works magazine between November 2021 and January 2022. I’ve just come close to repeating that feat, making the cover for three out of the four issues between June and September this year. As pictured above, the topics this time were near-Earth asteroids, gravity and the solar cycle. The first two are particular favourites of mine, having previously covered the asteroid threat in my book Cosmic Impact, while my PhD thesis was all about gravity and its effects on stellar orbits. Around 15 years after that, in the late 1990s, I had some peripheral involvement with BAE Systems’ “Project Greenglow” on the possibility of gravity control (or antigravity, if you like) – something I’ve written about on a number of occasions, for example in this blog post from 2015. As I said there, my link to the BAE project came through its leader, Ron Evans, who I’ve remained in touch with ever since. So I was really pleased when the magazine editor asked me to include something about “antigravity” in the How It Works feature, as it gave me the opportunity to include a brief Q&A with Ron as a sidebar at the end of the article.

Three cover features in a row

How It Works magazine covers

I made the cover of How It Works magazine for the third month in a row! The above screenshot is from the publisher’s website where you can buy copies even if you missed them when they came out. As you can see, the subjects are pretty eclectic. November’s feature was all about UFOs, which is a longstanding interest of mine (the weirder aspects of the topic are covered in my book Pseudoscience and Science Fiction, although the magazine feature is focused on more mundane causes of unidentified aerial phenomena). Then my December piece was about the James Webb Space Telescope, currently on its way to explore the depths of the universe – an online version is available on the LiveScience website. Finally this month’s article is about the huge nuclear-fusion-producing laser at the National Ignition Facility in California – that one is online too.

Writing for Magazines

2019 magazine covers

I’ve been writing books, ebooks and online articles for about 8 years now, but it’s only recently that I can add print magazines to the list. Until 6 months ago, my only experience in this area was for Fortean Times, where I’ve had 15 short pieces published since 2012. But as unique and prestigious as FT is, that only averages 2 articles per year. Then back in June I made contact with another great magazine called How It Works, after they gave my book Cosmic Impact a 5-star review. I’ve had a steady stream of assignments from them since then – plus a few from its sister magazine All About Space – as you can see from the pile of issues pictured above.

All the covers have features by me mentioned on them. Most prominent is the one about the Big Bang for All About Space. I’m also responsible for “Secrets of Apollo 11” – the one in small print on the top-left How It Works, not the main cover feature of the same title for All About Space (my contribution to the latter issue being “Do We Live in a Multiverse?”). In the other HIW issues, look out for “Your Guide to Time Travel”, “The Amazing Power of Antimatter”, “How Jupiter Saved the Earth”, “Mapping the Milky Way” and “Deadly Weapons of the Future” – they’re all by me. Slightly miffed about the last title, though, as the article itself is mainly about non-lethal weapons!

There are a few other pieces by me hidden inside some of the issues, plus more on the way. I’ve added a new page to my website to keep track of them.

Out now: Astrobiology

Astrobiology cover

This is my third contribution to the Hot Science series from Icon Books, after Destination Mars and Cosmic Impact. The publishers decided on the book’s title (and even advertised it online) before I was assigned to the project, which was a new experience for me. And it was more than a little daunting that the title contains “biology” – a subject I know next to nothing about. When I took the book on, I planned to focus mainly on the “astro” part – my comfort zone – but in writing it I got more enthusiastic about the biology side, which ended up filling a fair chunk of the book after all.

Astrobiology: The Search for Life Elsewhere in the Universe is available from all the usual places – for example Amazon.com or Amazon UK – both as a paperback and an ebook. Here is the back-cover blurb:

Extraterrestrial life is a common theme in science fiction, but is it a serious prospect in the real world? Astrobiology is the emerging field of science that seeks to answer this question.

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, the tell-tale ‘signatures’ it produces, and how such signatures might be detected elsewhere in the Solar System or on the many exoplanets now being discovered by the Kepler and TESS missions.

Along the way the book addresses key questions such as the riddle of Fermi’s paradox (‘Where is everybody?’) and the crucial role of DNA and water – they’re essential to ‘life as we know it’, but is the same true of alien life? And the really big question: when we eventually find extraterrestrials, will they be friendly or hostile?

Good reviews for Cosmic Impact

Sky at Night Cosmic Impact review

As you can see from the above picture, the current issue of the BBC’s Sky at Night magazine includes a review of my book Cosmic Impact. It’s a really nice review, too, by Katrin Raynor-Evans – who says, among other positive things: “The text is superb … It is informative and clear, and May manages to encapsulate everything you need to know about the potential risk to our planet and species.” She gives it four stars out of five.

Cosmic Impact also gets four stars from Brian Clegg, at his Popular Science  book review site. Again the review has lots of positive comments, including the following:

This short book is ideal to get a good overview of the subject without having to delve into too much technical detail – and May makes it approachable by giving the subject context from the many science fiction and popular culture scenarios … where something hits the Earth from outer space.

Finally, although I haven’t seen it myself, I’m told I got a very brief but favourable mention in New Scientist, in the issue dated 2 February 2019. It’s in the “Don’t Miss” column, under the subheading “Read”. After recommending the Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration to “armchair adventurers” they go on to say:

But if hiding under the sofa is more your style, try Cosmic Impact: Understanding the Threat to Earth from Asteroids and Comets by Andrew May.

If you want to do just that, you can find it in any good bookstore or via the following Amazon links:

Postscript 10 May 2019

Another excellent review in the May issue of How It Works magazine – this time with a five-star rating:

How It Works Cosmic Impact review

Cosmic Impact – out now!

Cosmic Impact

Following in the footsteps of Destination Mars, my second contribution to the Hot Science series has just been published by Icon Books. It’s called Cosmic Impact: Understanding the Threat to Earth from Asteroids and Comets, and here is what the publishers say about it:

As end-of-the-world scenarios go, an apocalyptic collision with an asteroid or comet is the new kid on the block, gaining respectability only in the last decade of the 20th century with the realisation that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by just such an impact.

Now the science community is making up for lost time, with worldwide efforts to track the thousands of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, and plans for high-tech hardware that could deflect an incoming object from a collision course – a procedure depicted, with little regard for scientific accuracy, in several Hollywood movies.

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, the devastating local and global effects that an impact event would produce, and – more optimistically – the way future space missions could avert a catastrophe.

Cosmic Impact is available either as a paperback or an ebook from all the usual places. If you’re an Amazon customer, here are some quick links for you:

Next book research

Asteroids, comets and impactsThese days I always seem to be working on a lot of things at once, so “next book” has multiple meanings. There’s the next one to be published, which I finished writing several months ago and is now making its way through the publisher’s production process. There’s the one I’ve been asked to write and given a title for, but I’ve barely started to think about it yet. And then there’s the one I’m actually writing at the moment. That’s the one I’m talking about here. There’s a clue to its subject matter in the research material pictured above!

Telescopic Tourist video

I’ve just belatedly produced a promotional video for my book The Telescopic Tourist’s Guide to the Moon, which came out last summer. Here it is:

The background “music” (actually just a sequence of spacey sounding chords) is my own composition!

Needless to say, The Telescopic Tourist’s Guide to the Moon is available from all good bookshops, as well as online retailers such as Amazon.com and Amazon UK.