Dr Denise Herzing knows the names of all the members of the pod of wild spotted dolphins she studies. She knows who the grandparents are and when their grandchildren were born. She recognises scars on flippers and can remember when the wounds first appeared. When the dolphins appear, she mimics their behaviour by swimming upside down to say hello. She is very familiar with each individual dolphin. This isn't surprising as she has shared 27 summers off the Florida coast and has had over 2,600 encounters with dolphins. She has spent more time with dolphins than anyone else on Earth. But this is still not enough for Denise. in fact, Denise has already spent years experimenting with communicating with the dolphins, but her greatest wish is that one day very soon the dolphins will be able to speak back and tell her what's on their minds. Dolphins have the second most evolved brain on the planet after the human race and they are highly sociable and intelligent and remarkably skilled at problem solving. They live in a complex society in which, together with friends and relatives, they raise their young, share responsibilities and resolve conflicts. So clever are these aquatic mammals that they can understand up to two hundred human words using gestures and symbols and even the difference between a statement and a question. "Many studies ask dolphins to respond to human commands, using fish as a reward, but rarely do we ask dolphins to seek something from us," says Dr Herzing. Denise knows that it won't be easy to get dolphins to 'speak' to us. Both the vocal chords of humans and dolphins and the sounds they produce are extremely different. Dolphins communicate with whistles, clicks and other sounds, some of which are too high- frequency for humans to make out. Her elegant solution, therefore, was to come up with a new simple language that both humans and dolphins could share. Her latest experiment involves a small waterproof computer that divers will wear called CHAT (Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry). It will send out one of eight signals that correspond to something in the undersea world, seaweed for example. The computer will listen to see if the dolphins mimic the signals. After the system has 'learnt' dolphin, all the sounds the dolphins make will then be put through the computer which will try to work out patterns in them in order to decode the vocabulary and grammar of 'dolphinese'. 4 This underwater translator is only at the trial stage at the moment, but if it is successful, it could have a huge impact. Not only would it delight marine biologists such as Denise Herzing, but it may be possible to adapt the system to enable two-way communication with other animal species, too. Scientists working at SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have also expressed a lot of interest in the device! They hope that CHAT could be used to make contact with life in distant galaxies! Herzing says that her research "may be our best training ground for exploring the cosmos for other life, because if we can't understand life on this planet then there is no hope for our exploration of the galaxy." 5The only question is, what on Earth are they going to say to us? Придумать 5 вопросов на английском с переводом к тексту