★★★★☆Meet Peter. He’s the dolphin that, in 1965, had to share a tank with a human named Margaret Howe for ten weeks. This was the era of the Cold War and the goal was to teach him English before the Soviets managed to do something similar. Peter and Margaret were carrying out this bizarre, not to say surreal, experiment, funded by Nasa, on the island of St Thomas in the Caribbean. We know about this because there are tapes of the strangest ever example of teaching English as a foreign language stored at Stanford University.

Source: The Times August 18, 2016 16:52 UTC