Up until recently, it would be considered unheard of to consider the notion that there is life on other planets outside or inside our small quadrant of the known universe. Exoplanets themselves have been a subject of great debate and discussion due to the limitations in space exploration currently and the subsequent lack of solid evidence to give their theorists and astrologers proof to work with.The planet in question is around 600 light years away from our own planet, reinforcing the fact that exoploration of the planet in our current state next to impossible. The radius is estimated at 2.4 times that of Earth, and the surface is thought to be an “ocean-like world” with its surface gravity being just over double that of Earth’s. Despite these claims, the planet’s general composition and density has come under great scrutiny. Since the planet is substantially larger than the earth, it is likely to have a different composition, depending on it’s actual mass. Natalie Batalha, one of the scientists on the Kepler project has speculated that “it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that life could exist in such an ocean”, this is however if the planet is either

predominantly liquid as opposed to rocky or gaseous, eg mostly ocean with a small rocky core.

There has been a conflicting idea that if the planet’s carbon cycle has ceased due to lack of oceans and plate tectonics, Kepler-22b my just turn out to be a searing, sterile, super-Venus planet. However, the reason for Kepler-22b’s importance is due to the location of the planet in relation to the planet’s sun, which is a G-type star, similar to our own. (The G-type star is a main sequence star that still converts large amounts of hydrogen to helium to give our planet the energy it needs to exist)It is in an area known as the Goldilocks Zone, an area of orbit that is just close enough to receive an equal amount of heat and cold temparature needed to support life.

This is the reason why so many bloggers and UFO-fanatics have been on the case of Kepler, although no such evidence yet supports this notion of the possibility of extra-terrestrial life forms, yet does not denounce the plausibilty of any form of life, large or small.

Life on other worlds?GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE ZONESStory by Tomas Cummings

But do no be alarmed if you believe this to be our only chance of discovering other life on our neighbouring planets, as Kepler is one of many planets discovered that could. By applying our known laws of physics and biology, the truth indeed, could be out there, be it in the form of microorganisms, or even advanced carbon based lifeforms such as ourselves. The universe itself is so large and incomprehensible, but this promising discovery could finally answer the age old question plaguing generations: where did we come from? Though the question is primitive in subject, scientists are more excited about their theories coming to fruition in the form of solid evidence in years to come.

MARS - COLD ZONEIs the planet found in what is commonly known as a cold zone, due to the unfavourable distance away from the sun. The least amount of energy is recieved and as a result the entirety of Mars’ climate ranges from a scorching -5 Celsius to -87 Celsius.There is evidence to support that the planet did have liquid water, due to the geography of the planet indicating rivers and tributaries.The only water you can find on the planet now takes the form of polar ice, similar to the life giving glacier’s on planet Earth.

EARTH - GOLDILOCKS ZONEEarth is, obviously the only planet in our solar system known to inhabit intelligent forms of life. This is because the distance from the sun is just right. The sheer diversity of life and how long it has existed is entirely down to the perfect living conditions the planet has had for centuries.

MERCURY - HOT ZONEMercury is the hottest planet in the soalr system, with a core of pure iron. The surface is a vision of sulfur, brimstone and extreme heat. No life can be supported in this harsh environment.

Recent studies have unearthed various traits and skills that animals have developed or never displayed until closer scrutiny and observation.Honey bees that display levels of pessimism linked back to a common ancestral trait and dolphins that can not only communicate to humans but can also grasp the concept of syntax.Then there is the studies that have revealed that both rats and elephants sense when another of their species is trapped, or in a state of peril, then cooperate to get them out of complex situations.Lastly, there has been evidence to support previous claims that fish use tools to get to their food and pigeon’s are not as stupid as previously thought. Both species exhibit problem solving abilities that are akin to our own logical thought processes that make us, us.

Bateson and Wright tested their bees with a type of experiment designed to show whether animals are, like humans, capable of experiencing cognitive states in which ambiguous information is interpreted in negative fashion. “Invertebrates like bees aren’t typically thought of as having human-like emotions,” said Bateson, yet honeybees and vertebrates share many neurological traits. “Way, way back, we share a common ancestor. The basic physiology of the brain has been retained over evolutionary time.

Dolphins have large, sophisticated brains, elaborately developed in the areas linked to higher-order thinking. They have a complex social structure, form alliances, share duties and display personalities. Put a mirror in their tank and they can recognize themselves, indicating a sense of self.When trained, they have a remarkable capacity to pick up language. At the Dolphin Institute in Hawaii, Louis Herman and his team taught dolphins hundreds of words using gestures and symbols. Dolphins, they found, could understand the difference between statements and questions, concepts like “none” or “absent,” and that changing word order changes the meaning of a sentence. Essentially, they get syntax.Divers demonstrated the system by pressing keys on a large submerged keyboard. Other humans would throw them the corresponding prop. In addition to being labeled with a symbol, each key was paired with a whistle that dolphins could mimic. A dolphin could ask for a toy either by pushing the key with her nose, or whistling. Herzing’s study is the first of its kind. “This is an authentic way to approach this, she’s not imposing herself on them,” said Lori Marino, the Emory University biologist who, with Hunter College psychologist Diana Reiss, pioneered dolphin self-recognition studies. “She’s cultivated a relationship with these dolphins over a very long time and it’s entirely on their terms. I think this is the future of working with dolphins.”To Herzing’s surprise, some of her spotted dolphins recruited bottlenose dolphins, another species, to the game. In the wild, dolphins

INTELLIGENT ANIMALSStory by Tomas Cummings

COMMUNICATORSHoney Bees and Dolphins

Communicators,Cooperators &Problem Solvers.

There are basic similarities.” Until now, though, they hadn’t been tested. Bateson and Wright trained their honeybees to associate one scent with a sugary reward and another scent with bitterness. Then they shook half their beehives, mimicking a predator attack. Afterwards, shaken bees still responded to the sugary scent, but were more reluctant than their unshaken brethren to investigate the in-between smell. “The methodology is sound,” said Lori Marino, an Emory University evolutionary neurobiologist who was not involved in the study. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that they are tapping into bee emotions. After all, every animal has to have emotions in order to learn and to make decisions. And we already know from many other studies that bees are really cognitively sophisticated.”But Bateson said the results could be interpreted another way. “Either bees have feelings, or cognitive bias isn’t as tightly correlated with feelings as we thought,” she said. “Maybe cognitive bias is not a good measure of emotion.”

communicate across cetacean species lines, coordinating hunting with other dolphins and even sharing babysitting duties. Herzing found the study sessions were most successful when, before playing, the humans and dolphins swam together slowly and in synchrony, mimicked each other and made eye contact. These are signs of good etiquette among dolphins. Humans also signal their interest in someone with eye contact and similar body language. Perhaps these are universal — and extraterrestrial — signs of good manners.

University of Chicago psychologists Jean Decety and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal describe their rat empathy-testing apparatus: An enclosure into which pairs of rats were placed, with one roaming free and the other restrained inside a plastic tube. It could only be opened from the outside, which is exactly what the free rats did — again and again and again, seemingly in response to their trapped companions’ distress.The experiment built on research conducted several years ago by geneticist Jeff Mogil at McGill University, where mice were shown capable of “emotional contagion” — a slightly scary-sounding term denoting a tendency to become upset when cagemates were in pain.Once rats learned to free their trapped and agitated partners, they did so almost immediately in trial after trial. The behavior was clearly deliberate. When the restrainer was empty, rats ignored it. When stuffed rats were restrained, the rats ignored them. “It’s compelling evidence that it’s the distress of the trapped cagemate motivating this helping behavior,” said Mason. “It is a huge leap up to use emotional contagion to actually do something, to actually

do experiments like this, and figure out how what they do is unique from learning.”In 2006, they showed that elephants could recognize themselves in a mirror, a benchmark feat believed to indicate an especially sophisticated level of self-awareness, on par with that of young humans.Though important, mirror self-recognition is just one test, and doesn’t address the sort of cooperative behavior for which elephants are famed in the wild. They’re known to help individuals in distress, cooperate in rearing children and may even mourn their dead. From a behavioral perspective, they clearly demonstrate empathy.But behavioral records from the wild are not the currency of cognitive psychology. After all, bees display incredible coordination, but few people would compare an individual bee’s consciousness to that of a person. According to Plotnik, one

COOPERATORSRats and Elephants

help another individual.”To make sure the rats weren’t responding to some immediate social reward — a rat version of a thank-you hug — the researchers tweaked the apparatus so that trapped rats were released into a separate cage. Again, the rats freed each other. When given the opportunity to eat chocolate treats first, rats were as likely to release their companions first, and even shared the chocolate with them. For Bartal, whether rats were motivated by their companions’ distress or their own is less interesting than the simple fact they responded at all. “The bottom line here is that nature is very smart. Nature made it rewarding for us to end the suffering of another,” she said.

While the researchers didn’t discuss mechanisms underlying the possible empathy, Bartal and de Waal suspect it’s linked to the lengthy care and nursing provided, as in all mammals, by mother rats. “Mammals that need nurture and care after they’re born

could argue that elephants and other cooperative animals are acting reflexively rather than thoughtfully. So he and de Waal turned to a test originally developed to measure cooperation in chimpanzees.In the original test, two chimps pulled on ropes attached to an otherwise inaccessible, food-containing box too heavy for one alone to move. In the version updated for elephantine strength — a too-heavy box would have been “as big as a 747,” said Plotnik — the rope was arranged so that if one elephant pulled alone, its partner couldn’t reach the rope. To get a banana treat, both had to pull simultaneously.Plotniks’ elephants pick the trick up quickly. Then, in the study’s key step, they demonstrated patience. If only one elephant was present, it would wait for a partner to arrive. Until then, it wouldn’t try to pull the rope, and often wouldn’t pick it up. Plotnik’s now working on other, more sophisticated tests of elephant cooperation. “Just because something hasn’t been tested doesn’t mean you reject it as not being possible,” he said.

would require some form of empathic connection between mother and offspring,” Bartal said. Sociality could be another important factor. Rats live in large family groups with complex hierarchies, and empathy is especially important in social settings.

Rats also share basic neurological features, such as a highly developed limbic system and various hormones and neurotransmitters, with all other mammals. These could provide a common ancestral origin for empathy, said Bartal, or evolution could have shaped them independently in converging ways. All roads could lead to empathy.

Asian elephants have passed a test of cooperation with flying colors, one that cognitive psychologists say demonstrates an ape-level awareness and sense of teamwork. Their collaboration isn’t just the product of rote learning, but the result of careful thought.In the wild, of course, elephants routinely work together. But that doesn’t pass laboratory muster, said University of Cambridge psychologist Joshua Plotkin.“It’s anecdotal evidence. These animals are empathetic, they’re cooperative,” he said. “But how empathetic? How cooperative? The best we can do is institute controls,

By now, the intelligence of birds is well known. Alex the African gray parrot had great verbal skills. Scrub jays, which hide caches of seeds and other food, have remarkable memories. And New Caledonian crows make and use tools in ways that would put the average home plumber to shame.Pigeons, it turns out, are no slouches either. It was known that they could count. But all sorts of animals, including bees, can count. Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability that until now had been demonstrated only in primates. In the 1990s scientists trained rhesus monkeys to look at groups of items on a screen and to rank them from the lowest number of items to the highest. They learned to rank groups of one, two and three items in various sizes and shapes. When tested, they were able to do the task even when unfamiliar numbers of things were introduced. In other words, having learned that two was more than one and three more than two, they could also figure out that five was more than two, or eight more than six.Damian Scarf, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Otago,

has captured what are believed to be the first images of a wild fish using a tool. The picture above, captured in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, shows a foot-long blackspot tuskfish smashing a clam on a rock until it cracks open, so the fish can gobble up the bivalve inside.Tool use was once thought to be exclusive to humans, and was considered a mark of our superior intelligent and bulging brains. In recent decades, though, more and more animals have shown an ability to work with tools and objects.

Elephants pick up branches with their trunk to swat flies and scratch themselves, a laboratory crow improvised a hooked tool from a wire to extract an insect and primates use sharpened sticks as spears, rocks to smash nuts and sticks to poke into ant nests.

in New Zealand, tried the same experiment with pigeons, and he and two colleagues report in the current issue of the journal Science that the pigeons did just as well as the monkeys. Elizabeth Brannon, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and one of the scientists who did the original experiments with monkeys, was impressed by the new results. “Their performance looks just like the monkeys’,” she said. Score one for the birds. The pigeons had learned an abstract rule: peck images on a screen in order, lower numbers to higher. It may have taken a year of training, with different shapes, sizes and colors of items, always in groups of one, two or three, but all that work paid off when it was time for higher math.Given groups of six and nine, they could pick, or peck, the images in the right order. This is one more bit of evidence of how smart birds really are, and it is intriguing because the pigeons’ performance was so similar

Tool use in fish, however, is much more rare, and there’s never been any photo or video evidence to prove it — until now. “The pictures provide fantastic proof of these intelligent fish at work using tools to access prey that they would otherwise miss out on,” said Culum Brown of Macquarie University in Sydney in a press release.

“It is apparent that this particular individual does this on a regular basis judging by the broken shells scattered around the anvil,” he said in the release.

What specifically constitutes tool use is a controversial topic. Is a seagull using a tool when it drops a shellfish on a rock? How about when archerfish spray a jet of water to knock prey off of twigs? There’s also the tricky problem of the ocean having all that watery stuff, and fish having no limbs.

For Brown, though, the blackspot tuskfish counts. “We really need to spend more time filming underwater to find out just how common tool use is in marine fish,” he said in the release. “It really is the final frontier down there.”

to the monkeys’. “I was surprised,” Dr. Scarf said. He and his colleagues wrote that the common ability to learn rules about numbers is an example either of different groups — birds and primates, in this case — evolving these abilities separately, or of both pigeons and primates using an ability that was already present in their last common ancestor. That would really be something, because the common ancestor of pigeons and primates would have been alive around 300 million years ago, before dinosaurs and mammals. It may be that counting was already important, but Dr. Scarf said that if he had to guess, he would lean toward the idea that the numerical ability he tested evolved separately. “I can definitely see why both monkeys and pigeons could profit from this ability,” he said.

Professional diver Scott Gardner

PROBLEM SOLVERSPigeons and Fish

Soldiers could have their minds plugged directly into weapons systems, undergo brain scans during recruitment and take courses of neural stimulation to boost their learning, if the armed forces embrace the latest developments in neuroscience to hone the performance of their troops.The report by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, says that while the rapid advance of neuroscience is expected to benefit society and improve treatments for brain disease and mental illness, it also has substantial security applications that should be carefully analysed.The report’s authors also anticipate new designer drugs that boost performance, make captives more talkative and make enemy troops fall asleep. “Neuroscience will have more of an impact in the future,” said Rod Flower, chair of the report’s working group. “People can see a lot of possibilities, but so far very few have made their way through to actual use.“All leaps forward start out this way. You have a groundswell of ideas and suddenly you get a step change.”The authors argue that while hostile uses of neuroscience and related

MILITARY TECHNOLOGYHave we gone too far?

technologies are ever more likely, scientists remain almost oblivious to the dual uses of their research.The report calls for a fresh effort to educate neuroscientists about such uses of the work early in their careers.Some techniques used widely in neuroscience are on the brink of being adopted by the military to improve the training of soldiers, pilots and other personnel.A growing body of research suggests that passing weak electrical signals through the skull, using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), can improve people’s performance in some tasks.One study cited by the report described how US neuroscientists employed tDCS to improve people’s ability to spot roadside bombs, snipers and other hidden threats in a virtual reality training programme used by US troops bound for the Middle East.“Those who had tDCS learned to spot the targets much quicker,” said Vince Clark, a cognitive neuroscientist and lead author on the study at the University of New Mexico. “Their accuracy increased twice as fast as those who had minimal brain stimulation. I was shocked that the effect was so large.”

Clark, whose wider research on tDCS could lead to radical therapies for those with dementia, psychiatric disorders and learning difficulties, admits to a tension in knowing that neuroscience will be used by the military.“As a scientist I dislike that someone might be hurt by my work. I want to reduce suffering, to make the world a better place, but there are people in the world with different intentions, and I don’t know how to deal with that. If I stop my work, the people who might be helped won’t be helped. Almost any technology has a defence application.”

Research with tDCS is in its infancy, but work so far suggests it might help people by boosting their attention and memory. According to the Royal Society report, when used with brain imaging systems, tDCS “may prove to be the much sought-after tool to enhance learning in a military context”.One of the report’s most striking scenarios involves the use of devices called brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) to connect people’s brains directly to military technology, including drones and other weapons systems. The work builds on research that has enabled people to control cursors and artificial limbs through BMIs that read their brain signals.“Since the human brain can process images, such as targets, much faster than the subject is consciously aware of, a neurally interfaced weapons system could provide significant advantages over other system control methods in terms of speed and accuracy,” the report states.The authors go on to stress the ethical and legal concerns that surround the use of BMIs by the military. Flower, a professor of pharmacology at the William Harvey Research Institute at Barts and the London hospital, said: “If you are controlling a drone and you shoot the wrong target or bomb a wedding party, who is responsible for that action? Is it you or the BMI?“There’s a blurring of the line between individual responsibility and the functioning of the machine. Where do you stop and the machine begin?”

Another tool expected to enter military use is the EEG (electroencephalogram), which uses a hairnet of electrodes to record brainwaves through the skull. Used with a system called “neurofeedback”, people can learn to control their brainwaves and improve their skills.According to the report, the technique has been shown to improve training in golfers and archers.

The US military research organisation, Darpa, has already used EEG to help spot targets in satellite images that were missed by the person screening them. The EEG traces revealed that the brain sometimes noticed targets but failed to make them conscious thoughts. Staff used the EEG traces to select a group of images for closer inspection and improved their target detection threefold, the report notes.Work on brain connectivity has already raised the prospect of using scans to select fast learners during recruitment drives.Research last year by Scott Grafton at the University of California, Santa Barbara, drew on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to measure the flexibility of brain networks. They found that a person’s flexibility helped predict how quickly they would learn a new task.

Other studies suggest neuroscience could help distinguish risk-takers from more conservative decision-makers, and so help with assessments of whether they are better suited to peacekeeping missions or special forces, the report states.

“Informal assessment occurs routinely throughout the military community. The issue is whether adopting more formal techniques based on the results of research in neuroeconomics, neuropsychology and other neuroscience disciplines confers an advantage in decision-making.”