Coming up this week, the most youthful planets ever seen.

They're very young, around 2 million years, compared to the age of our solar system,

which is about 4.5 billion years old.

And China adds another big water project to its long list.

Yes, it's been a long history of engineering to control water in China. In fact,

some people have referred to it as a hydrological civilization. Plus changing taste perception

in the brain, and we look back on 100 years of testing general relativity. This is the nature

podcast for November the 18th, 2015. I'm Kerry Smith. And I'm Adam Levy.

There's nothing more special than new life coming into the world. And it's particularly

impressive when it's whole new planets. This week, a team from the University of Arizona

have spotted a clutch of baby planets near the very beginning of their lives.

But they're not as cute as you're imagining.

They are huge.

These giant babies are many times bigger than Jupiter.

They're also the first planets ever to be caught in the act of forming.

Reporter Lizzie Gibney spoke to Arizona astronomer Steph Salam about the infant planets.

She began by asking why astronomers are only now able to pick up the distant pitter-patter of accumulating dust particles.

So there are a couple of different reasons why it's hard to catch planets in the act of forming.

One is that the planet formation process is pretty quick compared to the lifetime of the star. So if you just chose

a random star to look for forming planets around, you wouldn't be very likely to find a star

that was forming planets at that instant. The other reason is that in order to directly observe planet formation, you need to be able

to see planets that are pretty faint, so like a thousand times fainter than their star,

...