Yes!  There are many different teams around the world working on this.  All using slightly different approaches.  One of the most popular, and longest running, is The Wild Dolphin Project, run by well-known researcher Denise Herzing.  You can find her all over the internet if you search for her.

Quite a bit actually.  Dulce’s character is drawn largely from the progress made with Koko, the female gorilla living at the Gorilla Foundation in California.  Unfortunately, Koko passed away recently, but she was the first of multiple gorillas at the foundation to dramatically advance the level of real cognitive communication between humans and apes.  In fact, the human character in the book named DeeAnn Draper is a real person, who worked at the foundation for ten years with those very same gorillas.  And every Breakthrough book published has been read and scrutinized by DeeAnn Draper to ensure accuracy and consistency in how both Dulce and Dexter would likely behave under these circumstances.

Yes.  As a matter of fact, the processing power of today’s supercomputers is understated in the Breakthrough books more than anything else.  In Mosaic, I briefly mentioned one of Google’s new supercomputers completely mastering the game of chess in mere hours, which is 100% true.  The system, called AlphaZero, not only mastered the entire game without any human input but it then promptly beat what was then the world’s top chess-champion program.  This is just a small example of not only what the systems are capable of today, but also their speed!

The core idea for the story was born many years ago when I was reading a book by famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.  At the end of one of his books, he posited an interesting thought which was: how could human beings ever hope to communicate with an extraterrestrial race if we haven’t even yet managed to communicate with the second-most intelligent species on the planet, or dolphins.   I thought about that question for a long time, wondering how that might be possible.  And given my background in Information Technology, I began forming an idea on how it might realistically happen, and what we might learn.  This eventually led to the writing of my first book Breakthrough.  Ironically, one of the newest teams to enter the field of dolphin language research is in Sweden, and they’re planning to use a powerful computer as their primary tool.  I wonder where they got that idea.  ;)

Very accurate.  The DNA research in breakthrough is deep and painstaking, as is much of the other information in the series.  More specifically, when speaking about common DNA between species, the data is both accurate and well-established within the scientific community.  For example, humans and apes sharing 95% or more of our genes is completely true, as is the same overlap, though to lesser degrees with other animals, such as mice, cats, and even cows.  This is one of the primary reasons mice are so useful in medical research.  Therefore, DNA overlap with dolphins is not at all surprising.

Yes, it is.  The commonalities between human, dolphin, and elephant brains were established by a researcher named Michael McGowen at the Center for Molecular Medicine.  You can read an article on that discovery using this link:  http://www.nbcnews.com/id/47970801/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/dolphins-humans-share-brainy-genes/#.XEdOdM2IZPY

This is perhaps one of the most-debated ideas of all the questions I receive.  Stories have abounded for decades about alien visitors from outside our solar system.  But rather than discuss the possibility, I think it’s more appropriate here to discuss likelihood.  In Mosaic, book five of the Breakthrough saga, Will Borger explains to Lee Kenwood the famed “Drake Equation.”  This was a calculation put forward by Frank Drake, in an attempt to actually quantify not just the likelihood but the actual number of possible alien races in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.  The number, even by conservative estimates is quite startling.  So, the question then becomes: if they do exist, how many are there, and is it possible that even one of them has already visited Earth?  And when you consider just how new our own technical abilities really are, and our deeply, almost instinctual desire to explore, it’s not all that hard to believe another species, or several of them, have had the same desire.

Believe it or not, I get asked this, or accused of this quite often.  The truth is, neither Breakthrough nor its sequels are intended as a subtle, or not-so-subtle, political soapbox.  It is not, and has never been my intention to sway people’s opinions on the subject of environmentalism.  We all have our own beliefs on what we are and should be doing, and the last thing I want the books to feel like is a debate.  Any environmental themes from the books stem solely from my belief that we live on a pretty amazing planet, and there are likely many things and relationships around us, which are beyond our current level of understanding.

Wormholes are a fascinating topic.  Described as a tunnel “through” time and space, wormholes are not only possible but predicted by the theory of general relativity.  Tunnels that could provide shortcuts for otherwise long journeys through space.  However, wormholes would also require extraordinary amounts of energy to be created.  So the questions for humans, given our current level of technical sophistication, is how do we do it, and when will be we able to?

Ha.  Believe it or not, I get this question a lot.  Steve Caesare's name is pronounced "Ceasare", like the salad.  And what very few people know is that he is based on a real person.