Who an actor is should never be confused with the roles he plays, but cinematic history is littered with talented people done in by their offscreen personalities and/or personal lives. Those successful at avoiding such fate are often playing a part even when they aren't playing a part. Cary Grant was a master of such role-playing. When not in character, he was the ultimate gentleman: confident, stylish, charming, and in control, with just the right amount of masculinity and aloofness. This facade made it all the harder to get to know him. Hollywood biographer Scott Eyman's new book Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise tries to find the real man, Archibald Leach, who became Cary Grant.  

Grant reached a level of fame rarely achieved, let alone sustained over decades, with so many great films bearing his name. The actor often joked that he wished he was Cary Grant. He was always torn between his origins as a poor kid from Bristol and the Hollywood legend he became. A friend once wrote of Grant, “when we were out together in Beverly Hills, people usually didn’t approach him, or interfere. He was an object of awe. Being famous, visibly famous, is a terrible fate.” The truth is that Grant had a brilliantly constructed persona, better than anything a studio marketing team could have developed.

You might think you're watching a travelogue from a train until you see the giant feline stalking your ride! Jonathan Lawton of West Yorkshire built this model railway and strapped a camera on the front, which is infinitely enhanced when his cat Mittens joins in the fun. -via Digg

When President John Adams was 85 years old, he attended a conference in Massachusetts and came down with the flu, which he suffered from for several weeks. However, it did not curb his activities much, as he related in a latter to his daughter Louisa.   

He wrote to Louisa after he recovered, saying, “I have had the influenza, and with great difficulty have got the better of it — but not perfectly cured.” Apparently it started as a cold that just got worse. “I attended every day the Convention,” he wrote, “and the air of that hall — instead of curing my cold imperceptibly increased it from day to day.”

Did he really expect the air of a crowded room to cure his cold? There was still a lot to learn as far as how colds and flus were spread in 1820, and Adams likely spread his disease far and wide. He wrote, “The unceasing hospitality of the gentlemen in Boston compelled me most willingly to accept invitations to dinner, almost everyday.”

Here is where the contact tracing list begins: “The company was most fascinating — an assemblage of the power, authority, wealth, genius, learning, and politeness of the State — the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, the President of Harvard College, the President of the Senate, the Chief Justice and other Judges, Mr. Webster, Mr. Prescot, Mr. Storry, some of the best of the clergy, strangers of distinction, electors of President and Vice President, and whatever characters there were most precious composed the company.”

In Adams' time, there were arguments back and forth about how illness spread. Adams attributed sickness to the weather, while Benjamin Franklin advocated for fresh air to blow stale air away. Neither really understood how diseases spreads, because no one did. Read about Adams' flu and how the former president might have infected all of Boston's elite at Plodding Through the Presidents. -via Strange Company

So apparently knife wielding squirrels are a thing now.... #Squirrels #Toronto #blogto pic.twitter.com/bEDpTqYcS6

— Andrea Diamond (@asdiamond) January 6, 2021

Camera footage captured this squirrel rampaging through Toronto. Local resident Andrea Diamond bravely approached to record the furry menace preparing himself for a no doubt savage rampage. Residents are urged to remain indoors with all lights out until the threat is neutralized.

-via Dave Barry

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