Sunday is more like Monday than it used to be. Places of business that used to keep daytime "business hours" are now open late into the night. And on the Internet, the hour of the day and the day of the week have become irrelevant. A half century ago in the United States, most people experienced strong and precise dividing lines between days of rest and days of work, school time and summer time. Today the boundaries still exist, but they seem not clear.

The law in almost all states used to require stores to close on Sunday; in most, it no longer does. It used to keep the schools open in all seasons except summer; in most, it still does. And whether the work week should strengthen its legal limits, or whether it should become more "flexible," is often debated. How should we, as a society, organize our time? Should we go even further in relaxing the boundaries of time until we live in a world where every minute is much like every other?

These are not easy questions even to ask. Part of the difficulty is that we rarely recognize the "law of time" even when we meet it face to face. We know as children that we have to attend school a certain number of hours, a certain number of days, a certain number of years—but unless we meet the truant officer(学监), we may well think that we should go to school due to social custom and parents' demand rather than to the law. As we shall see, there is a lot of law that has a great influence on how we organize and use time: compulsory education law, overtime law, and daylight-saving law—as well as law about Sunday closing, holidays, being late to work, time zones, and so on. Once we begin to look for it, we will have no trouble finding a law of time to examine and assess.

If Siri had any feelings, she would know she was being teased. When 10-year-old Belinda and her friends play, they sometimes ask Siri questions in the hope she will say something random and make them laugh. "Do a rap, "they urge Siri, "Tell us a bedtime story."

Belinda and her friends have grown up interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of Siri, Alexa and Google. They were born into a world of portable devices(装置).

In 2010 when the first of their generation were born, Apple released the first iPad, internet activist Julian Assange published thousands of classified documents, Mark Zuckerberg was Time's person of the year.

Mark McCrindle, Sydney-based social researcher, first coined the term Generation Alpha to describe those born between about 2010 and 2024 in his book Generation Alpha. He said this generation have access to more technology, information and external(外部的)influences than any generation before them, and at a younger age.

Belinda has had an iPad since year 3 and is allowed to use her iPad after doing violin and piano practice. "It's always 'Can I use my iPad, I'll do that afterwards' and the afterwards never happens, "Catherine says, "Change the order and it gets done."

Belinda is on guard against "stranger danger" and ensures her privacy settings, which mean that only her friends can join her in games. On occasion Belinda has wiped all her apps off her iPad, worried that she has disclosed too much, such as her date of birth and photo. When she downloads apps now she doesn't use her real date of birth.

In his book, McCrindle says, "In some ways, Generation Alpha are part of an unintentional global experiment in which screens are placed in front of them from the youngest age so we should pay attention to the addictive nature of devices and internet security."

Back in November 2019, Alessandra Mascaro, a volunteer working at the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project in Loango National Park, Gabon, West Africa, saw something she couldn't quite believe——one of the apes named Suzee noticed her son Sia had hurt his foot. After seemingly thinking about the best course of action, she then plucked an insect out of the air, licked it and applied it to the wound.

Mascaro captured the whole touching moment on film and showed her tutor, Dr. Tobias Deschner, a zoologist working for Ozouga. The Ozouga team then set about monitoring the chimpanzees in the park and looking for other examples of the behaviour. Over the following 15 months they captured 76incidences of the apes applying insects to wounds on themselves or other group members. There searchers are uncertain why the chimps use the insects, or even which insects they are, but suspect they might have lenitive properties that could provide pain relief.

However, the finding really proves that the act of applying am insect to treat other's wounds is a clear example of prosocial behavior (亲社会行为) that echoes the acts of empathy displayed by human beings. -This is, for me, especially breathtaking because so many people doubt prosocial abilities in other animals. Suddenly we have a species where we really see individuals caring for others, "Deschner said.

The team now aims to identify the insects being used by the chimpanzees and investigate who is applying insects to whom to establish whether the behaviour is based on a social rank. "We need to still put much more effort into studying great apes because it is crucial to shed light on our own cognitive evolution, "said Deschner.