Caroline Wozniacki defeated Samona Helip to win the title of Grand Grand Salem

Denmark's Caroline Minerie Becky defeated Romanian Sima's Helip to win the title of her first grandmother Salem and won the number one rating in the Australian Open.

The second seed won 7-6 (7-2) 3-6 6-4 in the 43th effort.

Nine years later, and after 17 months, he was able to overcome the dean after the 74rd classification.

Wozniacki said, "I dreamed for many years since that moment, and today the dream of staying here is true."

The victory means that 27-year-old ages will change the number of humps to World Rankings on Monday.

One runner in the U.S. Open, Wininsney Becky becomes the first dean to win the title of Grand Slam singles.

Helip also was hoping to finish waiting for the first major title to include a number of her, but now she has lost in the Australian Open Final as well as two French Open.

"I'm really sad but Caroline was better than me," he said.

"I fight and walk for so many years, so hopefully another challenge will face today."


Wozniacki takes Grand Slam opportunity

The humidity got to both players with Halep struggling in the second set

Final final may start in 19:30 local time but conditions were neutral, with temperatures at night above 30C and humidity cruises.

Both the women supported the test points in the final, on the way to save the match points, and sometimes the opportunity to remove the grading final set.

Ministers Becky picked up the open-up opener in the basket, 4-1 lip slip and after helping to spread the problem in trouble when he needed treatment from Dr. Medal through the second set.

However, after taking their blood pressure, Romania returned to take three of the four next games, taking one with a Fondandand winner.

He was in the influence of heat rule, or the player wanted to use it, and Helip took an opportunity to stop the action for 10 minutes and the finalist allowed the court to look for air conditioning.

The Holap had now spent more than 13 hours during the tournament, while Vodnazaki - who saved two match points against Jinna Ft in round two - up to 12 hours.

The final set was a great test of mind and body, and he developed some great tennis.

After serving twice after breaking, Viszoni Becky left another Grand Slam when she broke out in 4-3 in judgment and needed to treat knee injury.

Instead, Wozniacki was the one who caught the moment, to play excellent in the final three games.


While serving with the hack now in the competition, Wozniacki's supremendous defense capabilities forced a mistake on the match point, leaving Dan out and stuck on the Road Laurea Arena court.

Match data

Vazni Beki's way for the title

Australia Open: Roger Federer retired Hainan Cheng by the final.

Roger Federer won 20 major singles and sixth eight Australian Opens, when he defeated his opposing Hunen Chen on Friday night semi-final after promoting the fight.

Federer led 6-1, 5-2 on the Road Laureate Arena, when he was removed from a terrace on his left foot before his decision to retire, in a tour of the remote Laureau Arena. Men's championships will meet World No. Six Maren Kaf in the final of the final.

The feeder, who was stuck at a sudden stop, said, "I have stood up with the roofs in the past and it is very painful."

"In a few minutes, it's too high and you can not take it further, when you think there's no way you can get back and make things really worse.

"It's better to stop. So it feels bittersweet.

"Obviously, I'm in the finest incredibly happier, but they do not like it, and they've played a wonderful tournament, so today's credit for them to try harder."

36-year-old Sweiss defeated the clinic for claiming her 19th position in the second generation in Melbourne, last year's Williams Final, and will prove her favorite on Sunday again, especially But when they enter without man entering the decision.

Prior to the retirement of Ching, he faced a slight problem under the roof of the Lower Lawrence Arena, which only took 33 minutes to secure the first set of three breaks of service.

When Ching served for 1-1 in the second set, a great news came from Australia's crowded crowd, who hoped that a classic warfare test witnessed.

But 21-year-old Professor, Professor, was nominated, the Federation's empowerment was not an answer.

Federer beat 3-1 with dipping bucked hand and after the 58-run class, Ching needed the treatment on the roof of his feet after losing the next game, his first hope was that South Korea Already reached a big single final.

Chong won another game, but his movement was clearly influenced and ended his night after an hour and two minutes, the court invited the court to sympathize with the raid.

It was a frustrating end to the first meeting between Federer and the person, whose holiday bar Melbourne Champion Novkakakakak won the fourth round victory over the world and took notice.

The Federation said about Ching: "We will see the top 10 to ensure that it's maximum," he said.

"The rest? We will see. I will not put too much pressure on it." She is working very well and I can see that she defeated Nikkak and Sagittarius (Alexander Gaulov) and all others this week. In the past.

Chang retirement performed a spectacular performance from the Federation, who fired Nineveh and created only one double mistake.

The clinic advanced in the men's finals, when he defeated Bronnie Kelly Adund on a straight set in the semi-final on Thursday night.

Federer lead 8 8 runs in the semi-finals with his sole success in Kyrgyzstan in 2014 with his career heads.

Women to get equal prize money in Tour Down Under cycling event

South Australian government’s announcement hailed by this year’s winner Amanda Spratt as ‘a huge step forward for equality’

Riders in the Women’s Tour Down Under will receive the same pay as their male counterparts for the first time, the South Australian government has announced.

On Monday the state government announced that from 2019 it would increase the prize pool in the women’s cycling event by about $90,000, putting the competition’s prize pool on par with the male event.

The initial women’s prize pool had been about $15,000.

“These athletes are at the top of their game, displaying professionalism, determination and skill during every stage of the hard-fought race,” the South Australian sports minister, Leon Bignell, said.

“It’s only fair the prize money they receive is on par with their male counterparts for each stage as well as the general classification.”

Australian Amanda Spratt won this year’s Women’s Tour Down Under, as well as the Queen of the Mountain prize for best climber. She called the decision “a huge step forward for equality”.

“Having equal prize money will result in even more interest from top international female riders and help take this race to the next level.”

The UCI – the world governing body for sports cycling – has introduced equal prize money for men and women at its world championship and world cup events, but unlike men, women cyclists still do not receive a minimum wage.

In January last year the former Olympic and world champion cyclist Nicole Cooke told a British House of Commons inquiry in the sport that cycling was “a sport run by men, for men”.

 Tennis players want more money? It's not as absurd as it sounds

Greg Jericho

 

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She pointed to a number of examples, including the 2006 British cycling championships, in which the women’s event was given “token” support.

“British male success on the international circuit at that time was nonexistent and previous British winner, David Millar was still serving his ban for doping.

The IQ test wars: why screening for intelligence is still so controversial – podcast

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Daphne Martschenko, University of Cambridge

Online IQ “quizzes” purport to be able to tell you whether or not “you have what it takes to be a member of the world’s most prestigious high IQ society”. But despite this hype, the relevance, usefulness and legitimacy of the IQ test is still hotly debated among educators, social scientists, and hard scientists.

To understand why, it’s important to understand the history underpinning the birth, development and expansion of IQ tests – one that includes their use to further marginalise ethnic minorities and poor communities. Listen to our in depth article, which explores this history.

It is written by Daphne Martschenko and read by Gemma Ware.

You can read the text version of the article here. And click here to read or listen to more in depth articles.

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The music in this episode is Night Caves, by Lee Rosevere from the Free Music Archive. A big thanks to City University London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios to record this podcast.

Daphne Martschenko, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

North and South Korea to unite at Winter Olympics: here are the hidden agendas behind this sports diplomacy

North and South Korean officials meet with International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach in Lausanne on January 20. Laurent Gillieron/EPA

Udo Merkel, University of Brighton

For many Western ears, Pyongyang and Pyeongchang sound very similar. Both are names of cities on the divided Korean peninsula. But the former is North Korea’s capital and show city, and the latter is the host town of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea’s Gangwon Province. It is located just 80km south of the heavily fortified border between the two countries.

Some observers may think that this choice of location was ill considered. But it allowed South Korea to claim in its application to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2011 that the event would also contribute to an improvement of inter-Korean relations.

As the games approach, this is becoming more of a reality. On January 17, the two Koreas agreed to march under one flag, and to field a joint women’s ice hockey team. And on January 20, representatives from both countries met at the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, to discuss and agree the details of North Korea’s participation in the Winter Olympics.

The focus of the Lausanne meeting was on Olympic protocol. The unified team at the opening ceremony on February 9 will be called Korea, marching with the Korean Unification Flag, carried by an athlete from each country. The team’s anthem will be the Korean folk song Arirang. Under a “wild card” system, North Korean athletes will compete in figure skating, skiing and the joint ice hockey team.

Until the final days of 2017, this looked extremely unlikely as the governments of both Korean states had not talked to each other for over two years.

Foreign policy – and sports diplomacy is part of that domain – usually happens behind closed doors, as do the processes behind it. Detailed knowledge of North Korea and the country’s internal, political dynamics is also rather limited. This is the most secretive and least understood country in the world, and as a result, some issues have been overlooked or misrepresented regarding the upcoming Olympics detente.

A long time coming

Much reference has been made to Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s speech on January 1 in which he wished Pyeongchang all the best for a successful Winter Olympics and offered to talk about the participation of North Korean athletes. But to consider the speech as the trigger of recent events is wrong. He was simply responding – albeit belatedly – to a speech given by the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, in June 2017 at the opening ceremony of the Taekwondo Word Championships in Muju, South Korea in which Moon explicitly proposed to send a unified Korean team to Pyeongchang to improve inter-Korean relations.

Moon also reminded his audience of sport’s power to improve relations by referring to the “Sunshine Policy”, which was in place from 1998 to 2008. It focused on engagement and rapprochement and led to the two countries marching together at various Summer and Winter Olympics as well as other regional sporting competitions.

The Korean Unification Flag, waved at the East Asian Football Federation Women’s Cup in 2005. Jeon Heon-Kyun/EPA

What most commentators overlooked was that Moon’s invitation to North Korea was also an encrypted diplomatic message to the US administration that the newly-elected South Korean government did not intend to follow the more confrontational, often incoherent, foreign policy approach favoured by the American president, Donald Trump.

By using his New Year speech to make his announcement, Kim knew it would attract both national and international attention. His words were clearly chosen for both audiences and contained two interrelated but different messages. For his domestic audience, they read: “I have Korean unity and reunification on my radar and will not forget it despite being preoccupied by developing our nuclear programme, testing missiles, UN sanctions, US threats, the warmonger Donald Trump, and so on.”

For the South Korean listeners, his words meant: “OK, I’ve got my missiles working now. That’s the American imperialists sorted. But I think we Koreans are somehow stuck in a cul-de-sac and, perhaps, should talk. Let’s keep it easy and simple at the beginning, leave Donald Trump out of it and talk about sport; and then we see where we go from there.”

The speed of the subsequent developments indicates that North Korea had thoroughly thought about this and was well prepared when the first talks between representatives of the north and the south took place on January 9. In comparison, almost a decade ago, negotiations between the two countries to send a unified team to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics took several months and led to nothing.

Playing politics

There is little doubt that the world of international sport continues to be a serious and very useful diplomatic tool. On this occasion, it may be a significant stepping stone for an improvement of inter-Korean relations. But, that depends on how serious Kim is as there is some concern that this is just a well-timed but short-lived public relations stunt. It also depends on whether this kind of sports diplomacy is fully embedded in a wider foreign policy from both North and South Korea that aims to achieve the same objectives.

Sport on its own is fairly powerless, but when skilfully integrated it can make significant contributions and promote wider foreign policy tools. It also provides the Korean people with access to a field of politics that usually lacks transparency.

For the IOC, this recent development was of course extremely good news and may distract from the Russian doping scandal and their other major concern, the steadily declining interest in hosting mega sports events.

Udo Merkel, Senior Lecturer in Events Management, University of Brighton

This article was originally published on The Conversation and here is published with permission. Read the original article.

NASA Examines Technology To Fold Aircraft Wings In Flight.

NASA conducts a flight test series to investigate the ability of an innovative technology to fold the outer portions of wings in flight as part of the Spanwise Adaptive Wing project, or SAW. Flight tests took place at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, using a subscale UAV called Prototype Technology-Evaluation Research Aircraft, or PTERA, provided by Area-I.

NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland developed the alloy material, and worked with Boeing Research & Technology to integrate the material into an actuator. The alloy is triggered by temperature to move the outer portions of wings up or down in flight.

The ability to fold wings to the ideal position of various flight conditions may produce several aerodynamic benefits for both subsonic and supersonic aircraft.

Robots and smart devices at tech show : CES 2018.

The biggest consumer technology expo in the world is wrapping up in Las Vegas.

The Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, featured thousands of smart gadgets, artificial intelligence devices and hi-tech cars.

One of the main trends in the expo was the drive toward more and more sophisticated technology in automobiles.

Huff Post Editor On Anzari Story: I Would Not Have Published This Piece .

The Dutch city that's more like Dubai.

You should always arrive in Rotterdam by train. That way, as you leave the station, you can turn around, as I did last month, put your bag down and look back at one of the most joyful buildings in the world. It’s the most exuberantly designed transportation hub since architect Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center at Idlewild Airport (later renamed JFK). Rotterdam Station soars, ignoring gravity, a balletic leap captured in steel, glass and wood.

This is the architectural test kitchen of Europe.

In any other city it would be a centrepiece, probably an anomaly, like Bilbao’s Guggenheim or Toronto’s City Hall. But in Rotterdam, it fits right in. This is a city of wild experimentation, the architectural test kitchen of Europe, a post-war Dubai or Doha, but done better. Instead of being thrown up by a single generation of wealthy people looking to make a global reputation, Rotterdam has evolved over three quarters of a century in response to the developing needs of its people and the times they have lived in. It’s a liveable, walkable, bikeable city. But it’s managed, like those Gulf state insta-cities, to impress at every turn, not with two or three standout buildings – a Transamerica Pyramid here, a Walt Disney Concert Hall there ­– but dozens.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Rotterdam Station is one of the gems of an architecturally jubilant city (Credit: Walter Bibikow/Getty Images)

At 1:28pm on 14 May 1940, a sinister apian buzz could be heard on the streets of the Dutch city, coming from the east. It was a sound they’d been dreading. Within a minute, the swarm was directly over Amsterdam’s twin sister with its own canals and ancient skinny timber and brick houses. Rotterdam was the industrial engine of the Netherlands and the world’s biggest port.

Fifteen minutes later, the planes turned back, leaving the city in flames that burnt for six days until there was nothing left to burn: 250 hectares, 25,000 homes, 11,000 commercial buildings in ashes. Rotterdam was gone.

Nearly gone. The fires weren’t even out by the time city officials met on 18 May to decide what to do next. Though the walls had mostly collapsed, there was more than enough to rebuild. It was the logical choice. It was a choice that Coventry, Warsaw and scores of German towns and cities would make over the coming years, putting Humpty Dumpty together again, piece by historically accurate piece, until a post-war visitor walking through the medievally narrow streets might never know.

In 1940, Rotterdam was reduced to ash and rubble by German bombers (Credit: Keystone-France/Getty Images)

Though there must have been some debate and some impassioned pleas to restore this 14th-Century city to something that could provide some sense of comfort and stability to generations of families, the decision that came out of that meeting was to bulldoze it all and start again. The city architect, Willem Witteveen, immediately started working on a plan. It would be new, but monumental and grand.

Then something even more remarkable happened. In 1944, when the city was still under German occupation but with an end in sight, industrialist Cees van der Leeuw called another meeting, this time in relative secret, in the tea room perched like a fascinator on top of his Van Nelle coffee, tea and tobacco factory. The factory was the city’s first modern architectural masterpiece (Le Corbusier called it ‘the most beautiful spectacle of the modern age’) and it was far enough from the centre to have been untouched by the war. There was an opportunity, van der Leeuw said.

After the city’s destruction, officials decided they would rebuild Rotterdam from scratch (Credit: robertharding/Alamy)

“These captains of industry thought it was better to have more flexibility than Witteveen,” explained Rotterdam architectural historian Michelle Provoost, pointing out that this business-led modernisation had started in the city even before the war, with buildings like Café Unie (destroyed and since rebuilt). “His plan was seen as too strict.” Witteveen wasn’t thinking big enough or modern enough for the businessmen or the German occupiers, who liked the idea of a blank slate to build a new, Reich-inspired city (which never got off the ground).

Van der Leeuw convinced the city to fire Witteveen and hire his assistant, Cornelis van Traa, to do something altogether more radical. “Van Traa introduced a free-flowing city of objects,” Provoost said.

This was the moment the new Rotterdam – the most architecturally serious, intense, playful, jubilant city in the world – was born.

Rotterdam is like Disneyland for architecture geeks (Credit: Geography Photos/Getty Images)

When you’re done gazing at Rotterdam Station, hop on one of the trams to Blaak station to get the full impact of the city. Walking out from under the subway station’s suspended peacock tail awning, you’ll see two masterpieces of late 20th- and early 21th-Century architecture. On your right are Piet Blom’s Kubuswoningen (1980-84), 39 cube houses, each balancing on its vertex atop its own stem, making for something that looks like a concrete forest. To the left is the Markthal (MVRDV, 2014), a massive horseshoe-shaped market with apartments and condominiums built into the sides. Inside is a mix of things to buy and things to eat (so much stroopwaffel). In addition to being iconic – the shape is simple but utterly unique – it is the logical evolution of the city marketplace where people can meet, eat and live.

Rotterdam is the most architecturally serious, intense, playful, jubilant city in the world

But what’s best about Rotterdam is what you see between the showpieces. Turn back around towards the tram stop and you’ll see Blaak 8 (Group A architects, 2012). It’s just an office building. It really doesn’t need to be as cool as it is, but look at its trapezoidal windows, its shape shifting every few floors. And over to your right, another office building, Blaak 31, has an Italian restaurant on the ground floor before it rises in three storey-high steps for no particular reason. The tax company that occupies much of it just announced that they’re building new headquarters in the shape of an hourglass; once again, just because.

Usually when I travel, I pick hotels based on location, history or amenities. In Rotterdam, I pick them for the architecture. For my first trip a couple of years ago, I stayed at Citizen M, part of a European chain of high-design, low-amenity hotels, this one low and flat, looking like something between a warehouse, a 1970s elementary school and a Mies ottoman. This time I stayed my first night in the Marriott in the Millennium Tower (WZMH, 2000), a late nod to postmodernism next to Rotterdam Station. My second night was in the city’s newest accommodation, a one-room hotel called the Wikkelboat. This floating room, moored in a marina, is made of 24 layers of wrapped cardboard, complete with deck and barbeque. It bobs under the Red Apple (KCAP, 2009), a cantilevered multi-use complex made with anodised aluminium that reddens naturally over time.

The shape of Rotterdam's Markthal is simple but utterly unique (Credit: EschCollection/Getty Images)

Rotterdam loves its buildings like Santa Monica loves its beaches. The best cafe space in town, the bottom floor of a post-war Bauhaus brick building with a glorious corner curve, is called the Dudok, named for its architect. Hugh, the bar and nightclub at the high-Modernist Hilton (1962), is named for Hugh Maaskant, the city’s premier post-war architect (who also did the Euromast, the city’s big tower).

Rotterdam is like Disneyland for architecture geeks. But it may be even more fun for the rest of us, who don’t usually pay attention to the buildings we work, play and live in, and who’ll go home and wonder why our cities can’t be a little more like Rotterdam.

A Better Way to Get Kids in Libraries: Stop Fining Them.

Over a million kids in New York City have public library cards. But about a fifth of them have blocked accounts due to fines.

It’s not so hard to get blocked. Your card gets suspended if you hit $15 in fines. At the New York Public Library, children under 18 years old are fined 10 cents a day per book (that’s a 25 cent fine for adults). And all media, like DVDs and tapes, will cost you $3 for every late day. For many kids, they’re too intimidated to either talk to their parents or librarians about it, so they just stop going.

New York Public Library President Tony Marx says library access should never be about who can afford to pay the fines.

“We’ve heard stories of parents saying to their kids, ‘We don’t want you to borrow books because you might be late with them and then you’ll have fines to worry about.’ That’s crazy!” said Marx.

Marx is currently on the look-out for some creative ways to not fine kids, but still hold them accountable. One idea he’s toying with: put a hold on a child’s account until they simply return their overdue materials, no fines involved. Five years ago, Marx granted city-wide amnesty to children with fines, and he says they saw 80,000 kids return to the library over time. Now, he’s trying to secure a $10 million endowment to get rid of fines in perpetuity.

Donald Trump faces backlash as he reveals 'Fake News Awards' winners.

President highlights journalists’ errors despite anger from some in his own party over his treatment of the media

Donald Trump, who has routinely peddled conspiracy theories and mistruths from the office of the presidency, sought to question the accuracy of the media on Wednesday by unveiling the so-called “Fake News Awards”.

The president used his preferred medium of Twitter to announce “the winners”, which ranged from minor errors by journalists on social media to news reports that later invited corrections, with the New York Times and CNN the most frequently named.

The “awards” were revealed on the Republican National Committee’s website, which swiftly crashed as a result of the attention, and prompted swift backlash, including from his own party.

Much of the list centered around reporting on the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election. The president has repeatedly dismissed the inquiry as “fake news”, despite the consensus of the US government and its allies that Moscow worked to sway the presidential election in Trump’s favor.

Shortly after making the awards public, Trump offered mild praise for a faction of the media, tweeting: “Despite some very corrupt and dishonest media coverage, there are many great reporters I respect and lots of GOOD NEWS for the American people to be proud of!”

While Trump’s attacks on press freedom date back to his candidacy, his decision to hold “Fake News Awards” marked a bizarre spectacle even by the standards of an impulsive president.

Trump had initially announced the awards at the start of the new year, with plans to hold them on 8 January. The date was later pushed to 17 January, as White House aides struggled in the interim to explain the event’s purpose or whether it would even take place.

Trump has often used his bully pulpit to highlight errors in the media, even when news organizations have taken steps to correct and apologize for any inaccuracies, and he has labeled the press the “enemy of the American people”. Trump has yet to acknowledge any of his lies, which have been tracked in an exhaustive list by the New York Times and underscore the president’s near daily disconnect from the truth. 

The move was nonetheless prime fodder for Trump’s base, which has rallied behind the president’s extraordinary assault on the first amendment. Polling has found Americans relatively split on the issue of trust in the news, with registered Republican voters far more likely to believe in media bias.

Two prominent Republican lawmakers did, however, rebuke Trump’s treatment of the media leading up to his “Fake News Awards”. John McCain and Jeff Flake, both senators from Arizona and among Trump’s most vocal critics, implored the president to retreat from his war against the press.

In an op-ed published Tuesday, McCain said Trump’s attacks on the media “provided cover for repressive regimes to follow suit”. 

“The phrase ‘fake news’ – granted legitimacy by an American president – is being used by autocrats to silence reporters, undermine political opponents, stave off media scrutiny and mislead citizens,” McCain wrote.

“We cannot afford to abdicate America’s longstanding role as the defender of human rights and democratic principles throughout the world.”

Flake, who is retiring from the Senate at the end of the year, took aim at Trump in a damning speech from the Senate floor.

“An American president who cannot take criticism, who must constantly deflect and distort and distract, who must find someone else to blame, is charting a very dangerous path,” Flake said.

“It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies.”

image credit the guardian

With Scarlett Johansson front and centre, finally it's Black Widow's time to shine.

Long-delayed plans for a female-led Marvel superhero movie following Wonder Woman’s triumph should deliver one of the studio’s biggest hitters

It’s not difficult to follow Hollywood’s logic in avoiding female-led superhero movies for most of the past 20 years. Whenever studios have taken risks on characters such as Catwoman (in 2004, with Halle Berry in the leathers) and Elektra (2005, with Jennifer Garner as the famed assassin), the box-office results have been paltry and the critical brickbats relentless.

Of course, when I say it is possible to follow the logic, this is not the same thing as saying such blinkered thinking is logical, which led us to a point where there were no major female-led comic-book flicks released in cinemas between 2005 and the debut of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman last year. For, by the same rationale, Hollywood ought to have banned all male-led sci-fi romps following the failure of Cowboys and Aliens to light up multiplexes in 2011. It did not, of course. When a female-led movie fails, the gender of the lead protagonist is immediately flagged up. When a male-led film heads straight for the DVD bargain bin, other aspects are highlighted.

It should not have taken the success of Jenkins’ warm-hearted DCEU origins tale for rival Marvel to finally take a chance on a solo outing for Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow (to be fair, the studio did already have the Brie Larsson-led Captain Marvel on its slate for 2019), but we can only assume there is a link. Johansson is a huge star in her own right, arguably better known than any of her fellow Avengers bar Robert Downey Jr, and yet she has only ever appeared in ensemble efforts within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So confident were Paramount of her pulling power that they cast her as the lead in the ill-conceived anime remake Ghost in the Shell last year, yet Marvel continued to procrastinate over delivering a film that would have seen the star of Under the Skin and Lucy take centre stage in her best-known role.

 A talent for taking down the bad guys … Johansson in Lucy. Photograph: Universal/Everett/Rex

No longer. Variety reported last week that Marvel is finally moving (tentatively) ahead with a solo Black Widow film the best part of a decade after studio chief Kevin Feige first indicated an interest, with TiMER’s Jac Schaeffer writing the script. Not much is known about the project, but it’s encouraging to see that the studio is finally moving in the right direction.

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With Johansson in the role, Black Widow surely now has the potential to become one of Marvel’s big hitters. The more fascinating corners of Romanoff’s twisted psyche (as seen in the comics) have barely been explored in the Avengers movies, beyond a brief mention of her chequered past as an assassin and spy in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and a somewhat controversial reference to her darkling origin as a creation of the sinister Soviet agent production line known as the Red Room in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

The obvious direction for Black Widow’s debut solo outing would be a straight-up origins tale detailing how the one-time KGB spy and assassin Natasha Romanoff came to join SHIELD. The only problem here is that Johansson is not old enough to have been born in the USSR, as her character was in the comic books. The print version is said to boast anti-ageing powers, but it has never been clear that the MCU iteration shares these, so to suddenly discover them would be an unexpected development to say the least.

A more suitable adventure for the superhero might be to imagine her caught up in a conspiracy involving people from her past, perhaps referencing the 1967 comic book run The Valiant Also Die. The early effort saw Romanoff brought face to face with her one-time husband, a man she thought long dead, who has become an evil communist version of Captain America known as the Red Guardian. There is space in that narrative for Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, an obvious candidate to appear alongside Romanoff, especially given his criminal underuse in most other MCU entries. Again, the cold war-era storyline might need updating.

A more recent entry that could provide for easy pickings is the 2010 Name of the Rose storyline, which saw Natasha targeted by a mysterious assailant. While trying to discover exactly who is trying to kill her, the SHIELD agent must examine her loyalties to fellow Avengers as well as questioning her own mental reliability after years of being brainwashed and conditioned by the Soviets.

Whatever line Marvel goes for, there should be no doubt that the star of a future Black Widow movie deserves this moment in the spotlight. There are few more charismatic screen presences in Hollywood than Johansson at full pelt, barrelling through cityscapes and taking down bad guys with immaculately choreographed martial arts moves. That Marvel gets to branch out into a hard-boiled noir twist on the superhero genre, potentially a radical new direction for the MCU, only adds to the win factor.

image credit the guardian

Babies can learn the value of persistence by watching grownups stick with a challenge.

When you quit in frustration, little eyes are watching and learning. Victor Maschek/Shutterstock.com

Julia Leonard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

You’re at home trying to make fresh tomato sauce, but can’t seem to get the tomatoes out of their plastic container from the grocery store. The bottom latch is not opening, so you pull harder. Although you’ve never seen this type of tomato container before, you have opened many similar ones in the past. After a minute of trying, you stop to consider the situation – should you keep pushing and pulling? Should you ask a friend for help? Should you give up on fresh tomatoes and just open a can?

We make decisions like this all the time. How much effort should we expend on something? We have only so much time and energy in the day. Five minutes fumbling with the container is five minutes taken away from reading a book, talking to your family or sleeping. In any given situation, you must decide how hard to try.

Developmental cognitive scientists like me are interested in how we make decisions about effort. In particular, how do young children, who are constantly encountering new situations, decide how hard to try?

If at first you don’t succeed, then what?

The importance of effort extends beyond our daily decisions about time allocation. Recent studies show that self-control and persistence increase academic outcomes independent of IQ. Even our personal beliefs about effort can affect academic outcomes. Children who think effort leads to achievement outperform those who believe ability is a fixed trait.

Given the link between persistence and academic success, decisions about effort are particularly important in childhood. Yet relatively little research has explored how young children learn what’s worth the effort.

We all know that infants are keen observers of the social world. But they’re not just idly watching; infants are tiny learning machines. They can generalize such abstract concepts as causal relationships and social roles from just a few examples. Even a 15-month-old infant can outperform a high-level computer in such tasks.

Could infants also make broad, generalizable inferences from a few examples when it comes to effort? If so, then maybe “grit” isn’t simply a character trait. Maybe it’s flexible and adaptable based on social context.

Just give up… or push through failure?

To explore this question, my colleagues and I showed 15-month-old babies one of two things: an experimenter working hard to achieve two different goals (getting a toy out of a container and getting a keychain off a carabiner), or an experimenter who effortlessly reached each goal.

Then we introduced the baby to a novel “music” toy that looked like it could be activated by pushing a big button on top. (The button could be pressed down but didn’t actually activate anything.) Out of sight of the babies, we turned on the music toy with a hidden button so that they heard that the toy could make music. We gave the babies the music toy and left the room. Then coders, who didn’t know which condition each baby was in, watched videotapes of the experiment and counted how many times babies tried to activate the toy by pressing the button.

Infants in the study try to activate a musical toy. Julia Anne Leonard, CC BY-ND

Across one study and a preregistered replication (182 babies in total), babies who had seen an adult persist and succeed pushed the button about twice as many times as those who saw an adult effortlessly succeed. In other words, babies learned that effort was valuable after watching just two examples of an adult working hard and succeeding.

Part of what’s exciting about this finding is that the babies didn’t just imitate the adult’s actions; instead, they generalized the value of effort to a novel task. The experimenter never demonstrated pushing a button or trying to make music. Instead the babies learned from different examples of effortful actions (opening a container or unlatching a carabineer) that the new toy probably also required persistence.

However, most of the time when a parent is frustrated, he’s focused on the task at hand and not on trying to teach his child the value of effort. Can babies also learn the value of effort from adults who are not deliberately demonstrating to them?

To address this question, we ran the experiment again, eliminating any pedagogical cues such as eye contact or child-friendly speech. Again, the infants tried harder on their own task after seeing an adult persist and succeed. However, the effects were much weaker when the adult didn’t use any pedagogical cues.

Persistence is a trait that helps kids in school and beyond. wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock.com

Learning tenacity by watching tenacity

Educators and parents want to know how to foster persistence when children encounter challenges. Our study suggests that persistence can be learned from adult models. Babies attentively watch those around them, and use that information to guide their own effortful behavior.

Yet babies don’t simply learn they should try harder at everything. Just like grownups, babies make rational decisions about effort. If they observe someone trying hard and succeeding, they try harder. When they see someone effortlessly succeed, they infer that effort may not be worthwhile.

So what does this mean for parents? We can’t presume that our results would work for parents in the home just as they work in the laboratory. However, if you know your toddler can achieve a task if she tries hard, it might be worth modeling effort and success for her first. Let us know if it works! We’d also like to know how lasting these effects can be, whether infants might generalize the value of effort to a broader range of contexts and how adult models of effort compare with explicit messages about the importance of effort. We hope to explore these questions in future studies.

Finally, this study suggests that parents don’t have to make things look easy all the time. The next time you struggle to open that tomato container, it’s OK, maybe even beneficial, to let your child see you sweat.

Julia Leonard, Ph.D. Student in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article with permission.