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ASTRONOMY has changed a lot in the days since you had to go and sit for hours with your eyeball at the focal point of a 5-metre-diameter telescope atop a mountain.

This is quickly evident in How Do You Find an Exoplanet? by John Asher Johnson, formerly a leading researcher at NASA. In 2012, his team discovered three exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf, including the smallest found to date. Now a professor at Harvard University, Johnson’s enthusiasm for his vibrant field is palpable in this valuable, concise guide for amateur astronomers and anyone else not afraid of a few technicalities.

Today, telescopes are controlled from a computer in a heated room. We have also lived through a revolution in our understanding of the cosmos. At the time of writing, orbiting other stars. This is one of the hottest areas in current research, with new finds making headlines almost weekly.

Since these remote planets are vanishingly dim alongside the overwhelming glare of their host stars, how do we find them? Johnson rattles through the astronomers’ main tricks. The two most successful techniques involve measuring the radial velocity, or wobble, of a star as it is tugged by an orbiting planet, and registering the minuscule dimming of starlight as a planet transits across the face of a star.

We are also getting good at capturing images of exoplanets alongside their stars. And then there is microlensing, where an exoplanet is detected by the way its gravity focuses the light of a distant background star. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts this effect, but attempts to apply it to astronomy were abandoned in 1936 because of the limits of photographic plate technology at the time.

The greatest value of reading an “insider” book, though, is the insight the author can give us into what we can expect in the near future. For my money, the most exciting discoveries will come from ESPRESSO – a particularly apt acronym for this nocturnal profession – which stands for Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations. This ultra-high-resolution spectrometer will soon be installed in the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile, where it will simultaneously harness the light-gathering capabilities of four huge 8.2- metre telescopes. By measuring the wobble of a targeted star down to a velocity of just 10 centimetres per second, ESPRESSO will be able to detect Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of their star.

As those headlines about new exoplanets increase, after reading this book, you will be able to say you predicted as much.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Third rock on the left”

Margaret Howe had some success in teaching language to Peter the dolphin (Image: The John Lilly Estate)

The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins explores a 1960s project to teach a dolphin English, but its true significance has been buried in sexual innuendo

On the rocky coastline of St Thomas, a small island in the American Virgin Islands, squat the dilapidated ruins of a villa. Built in the 1960s by the eccentric neuroscientist John Lilly, this research station was once the site of one of the most ambitious experimental programmes in animal behaviour. Lilly hoped to teach dolphins to speak English.

Christopher Riley’s documentary The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins does a good job of explaining, in sober terms, why this idea isn’t as hopelessly crazy as it sounds. Researchers had been trying to teach chimpanzees sign language, and even spoken English, with limited success. Bottlenose dolphins are deeply social animals and seem to demonstrate a high level of intelligence in their behaviour. Indeed, we now suspect that in the wild, dolphins use signature whistles to identify each other; in other words, they have names.

When Lilly’s wife told him she had noticed lab dolphins imitating the tones of conversation between researchers, he reasoned that perhaps dolphins could be taught to not only understand human speech, but recreate words themselves through their blowholes.

Some of the funding for Lilly’s research came from NASA. Through the 1950s and 60s the agency, and radio astronomers in general, took increasingly seriously the possibility that there were other technological civilisations in our galaxy. If Lilly could establish communication with another animal species on Earth, lessons from his work might help humanity understand radio messages from extraterrestrial intelligent life.

With the arrival in St Thomas of a young and enthusiastic college dropout, Margaret Howe, the entire second floor of the villa was waterproofed and flooded so that human and dolphin could work together closely. Howe lived full time with a dolphin named Peter, and attempted to teach him English: hence the girl who talked to dolphins.

Howe had some early success, and was able to train Peter to make a recognisable attempt at approximating the sound and intonation of English words, repeating them back to her for fish treats. But for the funders, anxious to see progress from this expensive programme, few signs emerged that the dolphin actually comprehended what words signified or represented. Peter never constructed novel sequences of sounds to communicate his own intentionality.

Things didn’t improve. Lilly began taking LSD as a way of exploring his own mind, and even injected the hallucinogen into female captive dolphins to see how they responded. (They didn’t.) But the revelation that cast the greatest shadow over the credibility of the work was the nature of the relationship that developed between Howe and her experimental subject – a story revealed years later in Hustler magazine.

During the study period, as Peter matured, his sexual urges increasingly became a distraction. At first, the researchers arranged temporary visits to the enclosure with the two females, but as these visits became more frequent and disruptive to the language work, Howe began to relieve his desires manually herself.

By the summer of 1966, funding for the dolphin speech experiments had dried up. St Thomas dolphin house was shut down, and the three dolphins were relocated to a research lab in Florida. We are asked to imagine that Peter’s subsequent trials and miseries were the result of a broken heart. Howe stayed on and got married.

Underneath this tosh (and not to give too much away) there is a much tougher, more uncomfortable story not getting told at this point: about laboratory life, animal welfare and whether non-human animals should be accorded rights. The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins is not a love story, much as it might want to be one.

Riley’s documentary is undeniably fascinating, however. It is compellingly assembled from archive footage and, in places, cleverly and subtly reconstructed. Humans are not perfectly objective, investigative robots: you choose to study an area you are passionate about, you tend to favour one theory over another, and you care what the outcome is. Particularly in animal research, it can be difficult to avoid becoming attached to your subjects. The skill in successful science is to make sure these impulses don’t taint your methods and the results you get from them.

Lilly spent his last years arguing, with some success, for the release of captive dolphins. In the end, he felt he had had no right to experiment upon them.

Howe, now Howe Lovatt, feels differently. Her language experiments with Peter lasted only a few months before the plug was pulled. She wonders what we may yet discover about intelligence and language, if only we would learn a little patience.

The Girl Who talked to Dolphins was broadcast in the UK on BBC Four on 17 June 2014

WITH a hibernation period of up to 100 million years, bacteria discovered on the Arctic sea floor may have longest life cycle of any known organism.

from the Geosciences Group at Newcastle University, UK, and colleagues came across the bacteria while studying biological activity in sediment samples from the sea floor off the Norwegian island of Svalbard. What the team expected to find were organisms that flourish in the cold, but are killed at higher temperatures.

Sure enough there was a peak of microbial activity in the sediment at a warm 20Ěý°C, but then the graph began to pick up again beyond 40Ěý°C, and there was a second peak of biological activity at around 55Ěý°C. A completely unexpected class of heat-loving microbes – thermophiles – had been embedded in the sediment as spores and only germinated as the temperature approached 50Ěý°C.

A look at the genetic sequences of the heat-lovers revealed that they are most closely related to bacteria from ecosystems in the warm, oxygen-depleted depths of oceanic crust or subsurface petroleum reservoirs. So what were heat-loving organisms doing in the freezing sediment of the Arctic?

Hubert’s theory, presented earlier this month at a Society for General Microbiology meeting in Nottingham, UK, proposes that rising currents thrust some cells out of their deep hot niche and into the cold Arctic seawater, where they lie dormant.

Sediment buries them until the temperature rises enough for them to germinate – but this could take up to a 100 million years. “It’s like there’s a seed bank in the sediment of diverse thermophiles,” says Hubert. These spores can remain viable for millions of years, he says, and so might wait-out the burial period and long migration down into the warmer subsurface. “This could explain how thermophiles colonise these subsurface niches and populate the deep biosphere,” he says.

Geomicrobiologist John Parkes of Cardiff University, UK, points out that there is an alternative explanation. “The entire ocean is circulated through deep oceanic crust about every million years,” he says, “so buried sediments could be inoculated as this fluid flows through them on its return to the ocean.”

What similarities will alien life forms have to living things here on Earth? We won’t know until we find some, but now there is evidence that at least the basic building blocks will be the same.

All terrestrial life forms share the same 20 amino acids. Biochemists have managed to synthesise 10 of them in experiments that simulate lifeless prebiotic environments, using proxies for lightning, ionising radiation from space, or hydrothermal vents to provide the necessary energy. Amino acids are also found inside meteorites formed before Earth was born.

and at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, point out that all these experiments produced a subset of the same 10 amino acids and calculate that these 10 require the least amount of energy to form.

This, they argue, suggests that if alien life exists it probably has the same 10 amino acids at its core.

Universal code?

They show how the other 10 may have been added one by one as early life on Earth became more sophisticated. More controversially, they go on to argue that this process dictated the evolution of the genetic code, suggesting it too is universal.

, a geneticist at the University of Kent, UK, suggests Higgs and Pudritz are pushing their conclusions too far.

“Laws of physics govern the universe, and it seems reasonable to suggest that there are laws of molecular biology that may also be universal,” he says. “But it seems unlikely that the very same genetic code would arise on another planet, even if there are similarities in the fundamental molecules such as amino acids.”

See also: First DNA analysis may be done on another planet

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