Although the interaction between humans and their environments is central to psychological science, its dynamics throughout the lifespan remain unexplored. We consider how ecological affordances—the opportunities and threats an environment poses for one’s goal achievement—can be differently perceived across developmental life stages. Integrating affordance-management and life-history perspectives, we propose that individuals perceive and respond to ecological affordances based on their prioritized goals, which shift systematically as they progress through life stages. The same environment can be perceived as posing an opportunity at one life stage, but as posing a threat or being irrelevant at other stages with different goal priorities. To illustrate the value of this framework, we focus on three environmental dimensions tied to recurring adaptive challenges in human history: genetic relatedness, physical violence, and sex-age ratio. We examine how individuals perceive and navigate ecological affordances across three key life stages—childhood, mating, and parenting—through multiple strategies: (a) recalibrating cognitive and affective attunement to relevant cues, (b) adjusting psychological and behavioral strategies, and (c) reconstructing their environments at various levels. By bridging social, developmental, and cognitive psychology with behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology, this framework advances our understanding of human-environment interactions by (a) challenging the assumption that environmental effects are static, (b) generating precise hypotheses about psychological and behavioral patterns, enabling systematic and holistic investigation, and (c) underscoring the potential for lifelong flexibility in ecological navigation.

We solve a Bayesian inverse Navier–Stokes (N–S) problem that assimilates velocimetry data by jointly reconstructing a flow field and learning its unknown N–S parameters. We devise an algorithm that learns the most likely parameters of a Carreau shear-thinning viscosity model, and estimates their uncertainties, from velocimetry data of a shear-thinning fluid. We conduct a magnetic resonance velocimetry experiment to obtain velocimetry data of an axisymmetric laminar jet in an idealised medical device (US Food and Drug Administration’s benchmark nozzle) for a blood analogue fluid. The algorithm successfully reconstructs the flow field and learns the most likely Carreau parameters. Predictions from the learned model agree well with rheometry measurements. The algorithm accepts any differentiable algebraic viscosity model, and can be extended to more complicated non-Newtonian fluids (e.g. Oldroyd-B fluid if a viscoelastic model is incorporated).

This article is part of an ongoing series at The Asia-Pacific Journal commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the US-Korean War.

Amidst the chaos surrounding North Korea's military offensive in the summer of 1950, the United Nations Security Council passed a series of resolutions which gave the United States-led United Nations Command (UNC) sanction to occupy the Korean peninsula. A crucial element of the work of this occupation – the second of southern Korea since 1945 – dealt with refugees. By August 1950, as the territory under United Nations Command jurisdiction shrank and came to centre around the Kyŏngsang provinces, South Korean authorities reported that the northern advance had displaced well over one million people.

Japan has not only suffered from dismal macroeconomic performance over the past two decades, but it has lost its edge in areas of its greatest competitive strength, such as electronics, especially information and communications technology (ICT) hardware Japanese electronics firms have declined by many standard measures of industrial performance, such as market share, exports, and profits.

[Japan's payments towards the UN budget, at more than 19 per cent, are second only to the US. Although all its efforts thus far to secure a permanent seat on the Security Council have been in vain, many Japanese citizens serve, some at high levels, on UN bodies. None has been more prominent than Sadako Ogata, Head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees through the decade of the 1990s.

Biological flyers and swimmers navigate in unsteady wake flows using limited sensory abilities and actuation energies. Understanding how vortical structures can be leveraged for energy-efficient navigation in unsteady flows is beneficial in developing autonomous navigation for small-scale aerial and marine vehicles. Such vehicles are typically operated with constrained onboard actuation and sensing capabilities, making energy-efficient trajectory planning critically important. This study finds that trajectory planners can leverage three-dimensionality appearing in a complex unsteady wake for efficient navigation using limited flowfield information. This is revealed with comprehensive investigations by finite-horizon model-predictive control for trajectory planning of a swimmer behind a cylinder wake at Reynolds number of 300. The navigation performance of three-dimensional cases is compared with scenarios in a two-dimensional (2-D) wake. The underactuated swimmer is able to reach the target by leveraging the background flow when the prediction horizon exceeds one-tenth of the wake-shedding period, demonstrating that navigation is feasible with limited information about the flowfield. Further, we identify that the swimmer can leverage the secondary transverse vortical structures to reach the target faster than is achievable navigating in a 2-D wake.

Using the dual-pathway framework (Beach et al., 2022a), we tested a Neuro-immune Network (NIN) hypothesis: i.e., that chronically elevated inflammatory processes may have delayed (i.e., incubation) effects on young adult substance use, leading to negative health outcomes. In a sample of 449 participants in the Family and Community Health Study who were followed from age 10 to age 29, we examined a non-self-report index of young adult elevated alcohol consumption (EAC). By controlling self-reported substance use at the transition to adulthood, we were able to isolate a significant delayed (incubation) effect from childhood exposure to danger to EAC (β = −.157, p = .006), which contributed to significantly worse aging outomes. Indirect effects from danger to aging outcomes via EAC were: GrimAge (IE = .010, [.002, .024]), Cardiac Risk (IE = −.004, [−.011, −.001]), DunedinPACE (IE = .002, [.000, .008]). In exploratory analyses we examined potential sex differences in effects, showing slightly stronger incubation effects for men and slightly stronger effects of EAC on aging outcomes for women. Results support the NIN hypothesis that incubation of immune pathway effects contributes to elevated alcohol consumption in young adulthood, resulting in accelerated aging and elevated cardiac risk outcomes via health behavior.