James' World 2

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Life doesn’t always go your way. This is one of the hardest and most universal lessons we learn as we move out of toddlerhood and into childhood and later adulthood. While it’s normal for a small child to throw a tantrum when they don’t get what they want when they want it, as kids get bigger, the ability to tolerate discomfort is an important skill to master. They need to wait their turn, lose gracefully, deal with hunger, sensory stimulation, and have someone side with someone else’s argument.

If your child seems to lose their cool more often than their peers or be unable to “deal” with aggravation or irritation in a developmentally appropriate way, you may want to help them build their frustration tolerance. We spoke with psychiatrist and parent coach Jess Beachkofksy about ways you can help your child grow these skills.

Spotting frustration before they blow

You know what a tantrum looks like, but to help your child build frustration tolerance, begin to notice early signs that they are getting overwhelmed and likely to have a meltdown. Then, help them start to notice how they feel in these moments so they can start to find ways to cope. “Kids need to be able to identify when they are getting frustrated so that they can implement the skills that will help them work through it,” Beachkofsky says.

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Photo: Prostock-studio (Shutterstock)

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From calfskin crowns to a throne so sacred it can never be sat on, here’s a look at how some of the world’s remaining monarchies celebrate their kings and queens.

“Monarchy runs on ritual and ceremony”, says Dr. Elena Woodacre, a reader in renaissance history at the University of Winchester.

“There are elements you tend to see in different coronations”, she explains, “there’s always some kind of installation or enthronement. There’s usually regalia or ritual clothing and the sacred elements like the anointing.”

“These elements are important both for reaffirming the sovereign’s role but also reaffirming the relationship between the monarch and the subject”, she adds.

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Elephants parade near the Grand Palace in Bangkok to celebrate the Thai King’s coronation

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The fate of Hitler’s Black victims–whether Afro-German or African-American soldiers and citizens–is often overlooked in studies of World War II.  The genocide of six million Jews is the central tragedy of the Holocaust and more recent studies point to the persecution of the disabled and homosexuals. Yet there is much more to be learned about Nazism from research on Nazi racial policies, particularly regarding Afro-Germans.  Racial prejudices in Germany grew dramatically after World War I, as did anti-Semitism. Those who had lived in German colonies in Africa lost their positions under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and brought back racist ideologies. Racial hysteria erupted with the occupation of the Rhineland by African and South Asian soldiers in the French colonial army, who were enforcing the reparations. The Nazis tragically built on this pre-existing German and Anglo-Saxon fear, distrust, and hatred of Blacks to justify even greater persecution.  By 1937, the sterilization of and then murder of hundreds of Afro-Germans, as well as black soldiers, became an important, tragic, and still misunderstood component of Nazi policy.

 

The “Black Horror: on the Rhine: German and U.S. Race Propaganda

Interracial relationships between German women in the Rhineland and Senegalese or other African soldiers from the French army led to the birth of several hundred mixed-race Afro-German children. These families and their children brought a new identity to interwar Germany.

However, some Germans, as well as Americans and British journalists and activists, used these relationships for their racist propaganda. They made films (such as “Black Horror on the Rhine”) and posters depicting Black soldiers as rapists who were a threat to the “purity” of white women and carriers of deadly venereal diseases. This racist propaganda was amplified by racist white Americans, as had been the case with the 1915 film Birth Of A Nation. That film was shown by the racist President Woodrow Wilson in the White House during his presidency and led to a rebirth of the KKK. White American racists influenced German and Nazi scientists, politicians, and others, and vice versa. America’s one-drop rule and laws against intermarriage between the races influenced the Nazis when they drafted the Nuremberg Laws (German laws that discriminated against Blacks, Jews, and other minorities). Additionally, Hitler blamed the Jews for African soldiers being stationed and reproducing in Germany with German women. Afro-German children who were a product of these relationships, were referred to as “Rhineland Bastards’’ and were seen as a threat to the “racial purity” of Germany. 

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Afro-German during the Third Reich. Photo: Propaganda-Pravada.

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In 1986, I left my native South Korea and came to Britain to study economics as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge.

Things were difficult. My spoken English was poor. Racism and cultural prejudices were rampant. And the weather was rubbish. But the most difficult thing was the food. Before coming to Britain, I had not realized how bad food can be. Meat was overcooked and under-seasoned. It was difficult to eat unless accompanied by gravy, which could be very good but also very bad. English mustard, which I fell in love with, became a vital weapon in my struggle to eat dinners. Vegetables were boiled long beyond the point of death to become textureless, and there was only salt around to make them edible. Some British friends would argue valiantly that their food was under-seasoned (err… tasteless?) because the ingredients were so good that you oughtn’t ruin them with fussy things like sauces, which those devious French used because they needed to hide bad meat and old vegetables. Any shred of plausibility of that argument quickly vanished when I visited France at the end of my first year in Cambridge and first tasted real French food.

British food culture of the 1980s was – in a word – conservative; deeply so. The British ate nothing unfamiliar. Food considered foreign was viewed with near-religious scepticism and visceral aversion. Other than completely Anglicised – and generally dire-quality – Chinese, Indian, and Italian, you could not get any other national cuisine, unless you traveled to Soho or another sophisticated district in London. British food conservatism was for me epitomized by the now defunct but then-rampant chain, Pizzaland. Realizing that pizza could be traumatically ‘foreign’, the menu lured customers with an option to have their pizza served with a baked potato – the culinary equivalent of a security blanket for British people.

As with all discussions of foreignness, of course, this attitude gets pretty absurd when you scrutinize it. The UK’s beloved Christmas dinner consists of turkey (North America), potatoes (Peru or Chile), carrots (Afghanistan), and Brussels sprouts (from, yep, Belgium). But never mind that. Brits then simply didn’t ‘do foreign’.

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Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty

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What is bullying?
It’s a sustained pattern of aggression by a person with more power, targeting someone with less power. The key, says Stella O’Malley, author of a ground-breaking 2022 book, Bully-Proof Kids, is that it’s repeated behavior. But beneath this simple definition lies a complex, multilayered situation that can be exceptionally tricky to unpack. What is the power, and where does it come from? With children, says O’Malley, it’s often that they have more social status, or have been led to believe they do.

One very big issue, which she returns to time and again in her book and in our conversation, is that bullying is always about more than what’s going on with two people: the bully and the target. What about the children O’Malley calls “wingmen”, the bully’s supporters, the kids who think the bully is the bee’s knees and want to stay in their favour? What’s happening with the kids watching silently – the bystanders? Who is seeing what’s happening, when it all starts to kick off, and getting out fast? Who’s calling out the injustice? To understand bullying, you have to see the whole picture.

Because, says O’Malley, bullying is about absolutely everyone in the group, room, office, or playground; even the bystanders – those who do or say nothing when bullying is taking place – because, as the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, not to speak is to speak; not to act is to act.

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Photo by Feodora Chiosea/Getty Images

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The iconic image of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87—sometimes referred to as the “fuzzy, orange donut”—has gotten its first official makeover with the help of machine learning. The new image further exposes a central region that is larger and darker, surrounded by the bright accreting gas shaped like a “skinny donut.” The team used the data obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration in 2017 and achieved, for the first time, the full resolution of the array.

In 2017, the EHT collaboration used a network of seven pre-existing telescopes around the world to gather data on M87, creating an “Earth-sized telescope.” However, since it is infeasible to cover the Earth’s entire surface with telescopes, gaps arise in the data—like missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

“With our new machine learning technique, PRIMO, we were able to achieve the maximum resolution of the current array,” says lead author Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study. “Since we cannot study black holes up close, the detail of an image plays a critical role in our ability to understand its behavior. The width of the ring in the image is now smaller by about a factor of two, which will be a powerful constraint for our theoretical models and tests of gravity.”

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New image of M87 supermassive black hole generated by the PRIMO algorithm using 2017 EHT data.

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Sarracenia X leucophylla.Credit…Laurence Gaume

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Not long ago, I left my home in sunny Australia to join an archaeological dig in the Siberian mountains of eastern Russia. On the first morning, I awoke cold to my core, even in a well-padded sleeping bag. I crept near the campfire and held my hands so close that the gloves began to smolder. But I kept shivering. I was cold on the inside.

As a medical doctor, I recognized the symptoms of mild hypothermia.

Siberia is a region where people surely always needed warm apparel. The origins of clothing is my special interest, a notoriously difficult topic because items of dress rarely last long. Trained in medicine and archaeology, I investigate the matter by combining what’s known about the thermal limits of human bodies and paleoenvironments. My brush with hypothermia, though embarrassing for someone with my expertise, reaffirmed my approach.

Standards of body cover vary across cultures. But many people would be mortified to be caught unclad in public. For folks in cold climates, insufficient clothing can be fatal, as I sensed in Siberia. Yet no other creatures don garments. Why our ancestors, alone in the entire animal kingdom, adopted clothes is one of those big questions that science has only recently begun to tackle.

Though many gaps in the story remain, the emerging evidence suggests clothing really had two origins: first for biological needs, then cultural.

The invisible remnants of early clothes

Archaeologists who study the Paleolithic or Stone Age tend to ignore clothing. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, considering not a single shred has survived from this ice age era between roughly 2.6 million and 12,000 years ago. Archaeologists are reluctant to look for something they will never find.

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Participating in an archaeology experiment, a contemporary woman dons fur clothing similar to what Paleolithic people in colder climates might have worn. Markus Scholz / Picture Alliance / Getty Images

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Not getting enough sleep is detrimental to both your health and productivity. Yawn. We’ve heard it all before. But results from one study impress just how bad a cumulative lack of sleep can be on performance. Subjects in a lab-based sleep study who were allowed to get only six hours of sleep a night for two weeks straight functioned as poorly as those who were forced to stay awake for two days straight. The kicker is the people who slept six hours per night thought they were doing just fine.

This sleep deprivation study, published in the journal Sleep, took 48 adults and restricted their sleep to a maximum of four, six, or eight hours a night for two weeks; one unlucky subset was deprived of sleep for three days straight.

During their time in the lab, the participants were tested every two hours (unless they were asleep, of course) on their cognitive performance as well as their reaction time. They also answered questions about their mood and any symptoms they were experiencing, basically, “How sleepy do you feel?”

Why Six Hours of Sleep Isn’t Enough

As you can imagine, the subjects who were allowed to sleep eight hours per night had the highest performance on average. Subjects who got only four hours a night did worse each day. The group who got six hours of sleep seemed to be holding their own, until around day 10 of the study.

In the last few days of the experiment, the subjects who were restricted to a maximum of six hours of sleep per night showed cognitive performance that was as bad as the people who weren’t allowed to sleep at all. Getting only six hours of shut-eye was as bad as not sleeping for two days straight. The group who got only four hours of sleep each night performed just as poorly, but they hit their low sooner.

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Photo by Photographer, Basak Gurbuz Derman/Getty Images.

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