It was a Sunday night. I circled the neighborhood a few times, looking for a place to park my car. Finally, I found one to the south of my house. It was behind a late-model Jeep. I tried to back into the space, but I failed to see the angles clearly. I heard it before I felt it, the sound of plastic on plastic, like a sheet of sandpaper along the surface of a painted piece of wood. I got out of my car to check the damage. My car was unharmed. However, there were two distinct lines on the Jeep.

Then I noticed a woman, walking her dog, who was now photographing me with her phone. “Hope you’re no planning to drive away,” she said quietly. Until then, I was annoyed with myself for having been careless, but now I was mad with her for taking my picture. How dare she, I thought. She had no respect for my privacy. And how dare she assume I would do the wrong thing? But soon I calmed down because I knew she wasn’t entirely incorrect. I’d made no decision to drive away without leaving ante (预付款) but I’d be lying if I said the idea hadn’t flashed across my mind. It was dark, and aside from her no one was watching. It happens all the time-the hit-and-run in the parking lot.

We all have those desires to behave selfishly, to go against the social contract; it is not the thought but what we do with it that counts. It is the commitment (承诺) to take responsibility, to care for one another, and to think about the greater good that makes this world a better place to stay. The choice to own up was left to me. I left a note with my name and phone number under the wiper blade (雨刮器) of the Jeep.

Do you ever get the feeling that you are being watched? Well, you might be right.

According to a study published in Nature on June 23, astronomers have found that 1,715 stars have had a direct view of Earth since humans have been here.

In order to do this, scientists used a previous method that looked for life on other planets. But at last, they changed the method so it could try to determine what places could see us.

The team looked at 331,312 stars within 326 light-years of Earth, with each light-year equaling 9.4 trillion (万亿) kilometers. Out of all those stars, only 1,715 of them could see Earth within the last 5,000 years, with an extra 319 stars that will be able to see us in the next 5,000 years.

“When I look up at the sky, it looks a little bit friendlier because it’s like, maybe somebody is waving,” said Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, US, and the study’s lead writer.

If a planet circling around one of those 1,715 stars is home to advanced life, they could easily see that there is life here because of the oxygen on Earth. If that didn’t give it away, then the radio waves we have sent out into space would also be a sign. In fact, human-made radio waves have already traveled through 75 of the closest stars on Kaltenegger’s list.

Why haven’t we heard from anyone yet, then?

It takes a long time for messages to travel between star systems. By the time a message could be received, that advanced civilization would probably not exist anymore.

Alan Boss, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in the US who wasn’t part of the study, wrote in an email that this long time would limit the chances for different life to exchange “emails and TIKTOK videos”.

“So we should not expect aliens to show up anytime soon,” Boss said.

A sleepover (过夜) program, which is designed to make kids believe that their favorite toys enjoy reading, can help encourage children to pick up more books, a new study suggests.

Toys sleepover programs are designed to get children interested in books. Children take their toys to a library for the night. At this point, workers and volunteers take photos of the toys which explore the library and read books. The next day, the children collect their toys and the photos of what the toys did during the night. They are given the books their toys chose to read.

It was found that before the sleepover the children did not spend time looking at the books in their play area at preschool. Immediately after the sleepover, the number of children who read to the toys was higher than the number who did not, but after three days the effect decreased gradually.

The researchers also tested a method for sustaining the effect. They reminded the children of the sleepover a month later, by hiding the toys and showing them the photos again the next day. This simple method brought an increase in the number of children reading to their toys.

The study proves for the first time that children who take part in sleepover programs read picture books to their toys more. “We wanted to know if there really was an effect, and if so, how long it lasts. Surprisingly, not only did the children show interest in the books, but they also began to read to their toys. This means that a new behavior pattern appeared that the children hadn’t had before. We did not expect anything like this,” said one of the researchers.

Reading is important for the development of children’s language skills and imagination. When parents read to their children, it is a passive way of reading for the child. However, when children read to their toys, it is a more active, self-directed way of reading, helping them develop into more active readers, researchers said.