On this side of the human psyche lies “whatever we deem as evil, inferior, or unacceptable”, such as lust, greed, envy, anger and rage. This side is the counterpoint to the persona or the conscious personality. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung calls this the “shadow.”

According to Jungian analyst Aniela Jaffe, the shadow is the "sum of all personal and collective psychic elements which, because of their incompatibility with the chosen conscious attitude, are denied expression in life" (cited in Diamond, p. 96).

[...]

Yet, the shadow, while very real, is not meant to be taken concretely or literally, but rather allegorically. It is not an evil entity existing apart from the person, nor an invading alien force, though it may be felt as such. The shadow is a universal (archetypal) feature of the human psyche for which we bear full responsibility to cope with as creatively as possible.

Because the shadow wreaks havoc and causes suffering to many individuals, it is often described as evil and sinister. However, it is not entirely true, for good things can also come with the shadow. In Jung’s words…

“[the shadow] also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc” (cited in Diamond, p. 96).

In other words, the shadow is still an essential part of the self, and the person has to integrate it unto himself.

More about this over at Psychology Today.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: jameswheeler/ Pixabay)

A pair of ancient remains from Ethiopia have changed how we perceived human history. The skeletons, named Lucy and Ardi, reveal much about early human evolution. Lucy is the widely-known ancient human ancestor, found in 1974 by anthropologist Donald Johanson and his graduate assistant Tom Gray: 

When reconstructed, the pieces composed about 40 per cent of the skeleton (or 70 per cent after lab technicians created mirror image replicas of bones missing on the opposite side) of a petite female with an ape-sized brain who stood just over 1 metre tall.

The Hadar team collected hundreds more specimens of the same species later dubbed Australopithecus afarensis. These filled in parts missing from Lucy, including skull, hands, and feet. Today this fossil species is one of the best-known in the human family with more than 400 specimens ranging from 3 to 3.7 million years old.

The lesser known of the duo is Ardi, a 4.4 million year-old skeleton found by Ethiopian scholar Yohannes Haile-Selassie. Ardi was 1.2 million years older than Lucy: 

Shortly after the Ardi skeleton had been transported back to the lab, paleoanthropologist Tim White made a shocking discovery – Ardi had a grasping big toe of a tree climber. This revelation arrived alongside seemingly contradictory ones; Ardi’s other four toes displayed anatomy similar to upright bipeds.

More revelations affirmed the hybrid style of Ardi’s locomotion: she climbed trees, but also walked erect on the ground. Although badly damaged, Ardi’s pelvis showed muscle attachments unique to bipeds – alongside other anatomy typical of arboreal apes. As the discovery team later reported, “It is so rife with anatomical surprises that no one could have imagined it without direct fossil evidence.”

Ardi defied predictions in many ways. By the time she was discovered, molecular biology had amassed compelling evidence that humans were closely and recently related to chimpanzees (at the time scientists estimated the two lineages diverged as recently as 5 million years ago, but most now think the split was much  earlier). Many scholars shared the expectation: the older the fossil, the more it would resemble a modern chimp or bonobo.

Image via Science Focus 

It’s been a little over a year ever since NASA engineer Evan Hilgemann was selected to join the team of scientists responsible for the well-being of the Curiosity rover on Mars. Now, Hilgemann shares with us the things he learned during that amount of time. Among the things he shares is the rover driver’s main job, as well as the three modes of the rover. Read Hilgemann’s article over at Medium.com.

Via Futurism

(Image Credit: NASA/ Wikimedia Commons)

With the many packages that he has delivered to people at various places, it is without saying that this man is tired. That, and it’s already nighttime.

He’s a pretty tough guy, though. He didn’t even say “ow”. He just looked up, placed the package beside the glass door, and said “UPS” as he went away with his hand on his head.

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

There's something very appealing about human skulls carved out of crystal. We now associate them with an Indiana Jones movie and the inspiration for a celebrity vodka, but for more than a century, they were sought-after relics of the Aztec Empire. In the late 1800s, these beautiful icons that illustrated the Aztecs' fascination with skulls began to be found in Mexico and sent to museums. It appears now that they are all fakes.  

When you combine the pre-Columbian fascination with skulls with the technical prowess at carving stone, it may have been easy for some to believe that these ancient people could have carved skulls out of crystal. And for nearly 150 years, that subtext helped a number of museum exhibit curators feel comfortable about displaying their crystal skulls, despite long-standing questions about these objects’ true origins.

It was only thanks to a number of investigations like Walsh’s in recent years that archaeologists have largely come to the consensus that these crystal skulls are fakes. Some still display them from time to time because of the public’s extreme interest.

So how did the crystal skull craze get started? Research traces them back to one man, who was able to profit handsomely on their authenticity because he was himself an expert on the authenticity of Mexican relics. Read that story at Discover magazine.  -via Strange Company


(Image credit: Gryffindor)

As global warming continues to be a problem for our planet, the permafrost in the Arctic region continues to melt, and with that, more frozen prehistoric animals are uncovered. Just recently, the remains of a baby woolly rhino was discovered in Siberia. Compared to previous woolly rhinos discovered in the region (Arctic Yakutia), this is said to be the best preserved, with all of its limbs and most of its internal organs, including the intestines, still intact.

"The young rhino was between three and four years old and lived separately from its mother when it died, most likely by drowning," palaeontologist Valery Plotnikov from the Russian Academy of Sciences, who made the first description of the find, told The Siberian Times. 

"The gender of the animal is still unknown. We are waiting for the radiocarbon analyses to define when it lived, the most likely range of dates is between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago."

More about this news over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Valery Plotnikov/The Siberian Times)

Gazing at the cosmos will always be part of the human experience. In any era, and in any age, there will always be some of us who will be curious at the events happening above us. If you’re one of those people that I’ve described, then it is for certain that you would not want to miss the skywatching events this year. Live Science lists some of these events over at their site. Have a look at the list and check the dates. For now, here’s some of them.

April 16 to 25 — Lyrids meteor shower

May 25 — Total lunar eclipse

June 10 — Annular solar eclipse (also called a “ring of fire”)

(Image Credit: Pexels/ Pixabay)

Just kidding, it’s not. It does look like one, though. Late physicist, biologist, and photographer Andreas Kay documented this odd creature during his time in Ecuador. The insect, a flatid planthopper nymph, looks like a walking piece of popcorn. Kay first shared the  video of the strange creature in May 2019, where the tiny insect is seen scurrying across his fingertip:

This is no ordinary bug, though—it looks like a tiny cloud or a piece of popcorn resting on little insect legs. There’s a reason for this strange appearance. The insect—which can be found in the Amazon rainforest—is covered with waxy white filaments for protection.

The unusual bug is one of roughly 12,500 known planthopper species on Earth. 

Planthoppers are insects that closely resemble plants that grow in their own environments. As their name suggests, planthoppers are able to “hop” around from A to B. Kay doesn’t capture this movement in the video, but we’re sure the insect would look just like a popping kernel.

Image via My Modern Met 

The Rijksmuseum has doubled its collection of works online. From Rembrandt, to Vermeer, and to other artists who used art to cope with loss and loneliness during the plagues of their time, the museum in Amsterdam has digitized 709,622 works of art. Their expansive digital collection is free for downloading, sharing and editing with a free Rijksmuseum account, which is just great. 

Image via Open Culture

How extreme you might ask? Some of them are standing at the ends of the Earth! These structures are built to withstand incredible temperatures and other environmental factors, so that scientists and researchers can work on tackling some of the planet’s biggest problems at their source (eg. climate change, rising sea levels). A series of research facilities and laboratories are built in the Antarctic, deep underwater, and some are alongside remote ecosystems. Wired lists some extreme structures that have been built and are just being built. Check the full piece here. 

Image via Wired 

Now this is something that archaeologists in the future might discover and then spend years wondering how the civilization living in it disappeared without a trace. Sadly, no one actually ever lived in this town. The Burj al Babas is a $200 million-dollar ghost town that was a development project gone wrong. After the Turkish real estate crisis, the real estate company handling this project went bankrupt, and the once-lavish area is now in ruins. 

While we look forward to things calming down here on Earth, there's going to be plenty of activity in the heavens. Ars Technica put together an overview of plans that include everything from innovative rockets to private flights to the construction of a new space station. And three different nations have spacecraft scheduled to land on Mars in February!

The United Arab Emirates' first mission to the Red Planet, Mars Hope, is due to arrive on February 9. At this time, the spacecraft will make a challenging maneuver to slow down and enter orbit around Mars with an altitude above the planet as low as 1,000km. If all goes well, the spacecraft will spend a Martian year—687 Earth days—studying the planet's atmosphere and better understanding its weather.

China has not said when, exactly, that its ambitious Tianwen-1 mission will arrive at Mars, but it's expected in mid-February. After the spacecraft enters orbit, it will spend a couple of months preparing to descend to the surface, assessing the planned landing site in the Utopia Planitia region. Then, China will attempt to become only the second country to soft-land a spacecraft on Mars that survives for more than a handful of seconds. It will be a huge moment for the country's space program.  

NASA's Mars Perseverance will likely be the last of three missions to arrive at Mars, reaching the Red Planet in mid-February and attempting a landing in Jezero Crater on February 18. This entry, descent, and landing phase—much like with the Curiosity lander in 2012—will be must-see TV.

Read what else 2021 has in store for space exploration at Ars Technica. -via Digg

(Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

Whoever made this banner seems to have been short of “A”s when he or she made this one. Either that, or maybe this person really intended this.

I don’t know what the word “hyppy” means, but if I were to make a guess, this word might be related to “hip” or “hype.”

Well, what do you think?

Image via Engrish.com

They call this Nordic Noir. I'm sure you'd have to have experience with the genre to fully get the humor, but it's funny even with no context. Anyone from Scandinavia willing to share their thoughts? The comments at reddit have links to some similar shows that you might want to explore, if you're into this sort of thing.

When retiring a nuclear warhead during the Cold War, the technicians at Lackland Air Force Base’s Medina Annex took care to remove the enriched uranium that gave it the unearthly power of a nuclear bomb. However, there remained quite a bit of TNT that was used to ignite the bomb, plus depleted uranium and natural uranium. The detonators also remained. On November 13, 1963, one of those warheads was interred underground in the nuclear weapons bunker at the Annex. Then something happened to trip a detonator.

“There’s no direct answer to what caused it that we know of,” insisted Floyd Lutz, who is eighty and owns a water treatment business in San Antonio. “When the igloo was fixin’ to ignite, we were inside setting down those units.” As soon as that loud crack! sounded, he and Ehlinger scampered through the open doorway amid dust and smoke.

“The fire started, so we hauled ass,” Lutz explained. They sprinted past Huser, yelling as they went.

“[They] didn’t have to tell me to run,” said Huser. “They went one way; I went the other down Perimeter Road. I guess it had rained the day before, and I bogged down in a ditch and fell, got back up and turned around and looked, and there was smoke coming off of the igloo’s vent. I was going to go to the next set of igloos to set off an alarm. I got about halfway, and the whole thing blew up.”

The blast itself was bad enough, as retold by those who were there, but those in the surrounding area thought World War III had erupted. And would there be nuclear fallout? Read the story of the 1963 detonation at Texas Monthly. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: 37th TRW Office of History and Research)