【推荐1】Astronomers have discovered an unusual solar system near Earth. It’s made up of six planets orbiting a star. What makes this system special is that the six planets’ orbits appear to be matched. Scientists compare their movement to a perfectly timed symphony.

“It’s precise and very orderly,” says Enric Pallé, an astronomer in the Canary Islands.

The discovery was announced on November 29. It’s based on data from two orbiting satellites, NASA’s TESS and the European Space Agency’s Cheops. The newly discovered system is 100 light-years from Earth, or about 600 trillion (万亿) miles. That’s close, in space terms. Astronomers are calling the system a “golden target” for further study. It could offer an example of how systems across the Milky Way were formed.

All solar systems are thought to have started out like this one. But they rarely keep their perfect timing. Giant planets can throw off the orbits of other planets. So can meteor (流星) impact. These things have happened in our solar system.

Hugh Osborn, of the University of Bern, in Switzerland, says his team was “shocked and delighted” by the discovery. “My jaw was on the floor,” he says. “That was a really nice moment.”

【推荐2】Back in 2015 my colleague Adam Frank of the University of Rochester and I were having lunch near Columbia University's campus in New York City. As at Fermi's lunch 65 years earlier, the conversation was about the nature of spacefaring species. And inspired by Fermi's mental calculation, we were trying to craft an investigative strategy that made the fewest possible unsubstantiated assumptions and that could be somehow tested or constrained with real data. At the center of this exercise was the simple thought that waves of exploration or settlement could come and go across the galaxy, with humans happening to come into being in one of the lonely periods.

This idea relates to Hart's original fact: that there is no evidence here on Earth today of extraterrestrial（外星的）explorers. But it goes further by asking whether we can obtain meaningful limits on galactic（星系的）life by constraining the exact length of time over which Earth might have gone unvisited. Perhaps long, long ago extraterrestrial explorers came and went. A number of scientists have, over the years, discussed the possibility of looking for artifacts that might have been left behind after such visitations of our solar system. The necessary scope of a complete search is hard to predict, but the situation on Earth alone turns out to be a bit more manageable. In 2018 another of my colleagues, Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, together with Adam Frank, produced a critical assessment of whether we could even tell if there had been an earlier industrial civilization on our planet.

As fantastic as it may seem, Schmidt and Frank argue—as do most planetary scientists—that it is actually very easy for time to erase essentially all signs of technological life on Earth. The only real evidence after a million or more years would boil down to isotopic or chemical stratigraphic anomalies—odd features such as synthetic molecules, plastics or radioactive fallout. Fossil remains and other paleontological markers are so rare that they might not tell us anything in this case.

Indeed, modern human urbanization covers only on order of about 1 percent of the planetary surface, providing a very small target area for any paleontologists（古生物学家）in the distant future. Schmidt and Frank also conclude that nobody has yet performed the necessary experiments to look exhaustively for such non-natural signatures on Earth. The bottom line is, if an industrial civilization on the scale of our own had existed a few million years ago, we might not know about it. That absolutely does not mean one existed; it indicates only that the possibility cannot be completely eliminated.

【推荐1】T. S. Eliot wrote of “Distracted from distraction by distraction /Filled with fancies and empty of meaning.” T. S. Eliot never had a smartphone.

Neither did I for a long time. No Facebook account; not even email. But according to my date of manufacture, I’m supposed to be a digital native. Perhaps it’s because by the age of 20 I was living in the Welsh countryside with no signal and no Wi-Fi.

When I finally fell into the digital world, I fell hard. Unlike my friends for whom social media and mobile technology had grown and flowered around them, for me it was a sudden immersion. I got Facebook, Twitter and Gmail accounts at the same time that I got an iPhone 4. I would check my phone; five minutes later I would check my phone again. I was addicted and it started to affect my relationships with friends and family

One night, without a word, I abandoned my iPhone and bought a Nokia 3310 and became the talk of the town. Soon I became aware that not only had I stolen secret time back from the hurried days, but somehow a secret space as well. I could stretch out, free to think again, to be wholly creative and to learn meaningfully.

But, wherever I went I got bloody lost. Wandering blindly around London, only to miss appointments, became a frequent pastime (消遣). What did we do before Google Maps? I was useless. The change was worth it, though. I’ll sound like an overstatement but I think it changed my life. My choices are broader and healthier because I’m not being screamed at all day.

I bought a new Samsung phone last week. I had been scared of the rate of progress, crying: “Stop the train! Stop the madness.” But I want to be part of building the future, and to do that, you’ve got to swim in contemporary waters. Rejecting the modern world doesn’t help anyone. It slows you down and I need to be efficient. Time will tell whether I’ve mastered the wisdom to reject constantly checking my phone.

【推荐3】Mirrors always tell the truth. When the evil Queen asked her mirror, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” she did not like the answer:“Snow White is the fairest of them all.” In the fairy tale, the Queen tried to kill Snow White to keep herself the fairest. In modern times, she would have just chosen some plastic surgery.

China’s plastic surgery industry has been developing rapidly in the past ten years as more people look in the mirror and try to change the “truth” of their reflection (影像). A recent study shows that nearly 60% of the Chinese college students surveyed were anxious about their appearance, and that about a quarter of them would consider receiving plastic surgery to look more physically attractive.

The reasons for which these young people are concerned with their looks have partly to do with necessity and partly to do with vanity (虚荣心). Studies have shown that, in today’s competitive job market, “physically attractive” people are more likely to be offered an interview and to land a job than those who have the same abilities but look ordinary. Psychologists call this the “halo effect” a type of cognitive bias (认知偏差) in which our good impression of a person in one area naturally leads to positive thoughts about this person in other areas.

There is also the effect that social media has on how people judge their appearance and understand real beauty. In the virtual (虚拟的) world, “ideal” faces have big eyes, thin high noses and pointed chins. This easily misleads young people into believing that they are not pretty enough, or are even ugly, and that they should turn to “outside help” for complete makeover. However, plastic surgery is just a fashion trend, with different features going in and out of style.

As the old saying goes, inner beauty is more important than outer beauty. As long as you are a good person, that goodness will shine through. The evil Queen was beautiful on the outside, but inside, she was very ugly. The mirror did not lie.