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Last modified on Mon 17 May 2021 14.47 EDT Douglas Livingstone, who has died aged 86 of heart failure, enjoyed parallel careers as an actor and writer for television and radio. His compelling six-part small-screen adaptation of The Day of the Triffids (1981), a rare excursion into sci-fi, remained faithful to John Wyndham’s novel, apart from re-setting the story from the 1950s to the near-future. One critic described it as “the most effective TV realisation of Wyndham’s writing”. Livingstone’s own creations often explored the pleasures and foibles of people taking time away from the pressures of city life. The Play for Today series proved to be a perfect showcase for his original ideas, although the BBC continuity announcer managed to omit the title in introducing the first one, I Can’t See My Little Willie (1970). ....
There was a time not too many decades ago when an astronomer suggesting the existence of life-bearing planets beyond our solar system would be considered heresy, albeit without the punishment of house arrest suffered by Galileo until his death in 1642. Fast forward to 2019, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, using HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b, later formally named Dimidium. They would share the prize “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos” with James Peebles, Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science at Princeton University. ....