In 1969, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people ever to walk on the Moon, a feat over the next three and a half years only 10 other space explorers would go on to achieve. Now it has taken nearly 50 years, but NASA once again has ambitions to land the first woman and the next man on th

This week we talk to the philosopher Toby Ord about the end of civilisation as we know it. Ok, it’s not all doom and gloom. As Toby says, he’s an optimistic person, but in his new book The Precipice (£25, Bloomsbury) he explains why we’re at a point in time where we, as a species, are teetering on the edge of extinctio

This week we catch up with Kevin Fong about the new series of his award-winning podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon. Whereas the first series celebrated the 50th anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements, the Moon landing, the new season follows what could have been one of our worst disasters – an ex

Imagine, just for one moment, that you’re flying. What can you see? How high up are you? Can you feel the rush of wind in your face? Keep these thoughts in mind while you listen to this week's podcast. Your imagination is a strange old thing, with some people experiencing vivid senses while some struggle to picture any

By day Dr Becky, is an astrophysicist, unravelling the mysteries of supermassive black holes, but by night entertains science buffs like us on her YouTube channel. In this week's episode of the Science Focus Podcast she explains how to find a black hole (and why they’re actually incredibly bright), what an astrophysici

If you were to picture the Moon landing in your head right now, you could probably conjure up images of Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps, accompanied by his inspirational (and often misquoted) speech, despite it happening many years before most of us were even born. But this remarkable achievement did not come easil