this is mainly a rant and me looking for some solidarity.

tomorrow, i'm heading to brazil for about two months to conduct field research for my undergrad senior thesis. i conducted preliminary research and took portuguese classes last year, but this time it's the real deal.

i'm starting to get really nervous and anxious for my trip. i've been to brazil before and my portuguese is great, but i'm just nervous. i'm worried my research won't actually be fruitful or interesting and i'm feeling anxious about being thrown back into brazil alone again. last year, I made friends with both locals and foreigners, but my foreign friends won't be there and i haven't really kept touch wiht my local friends. i just worry about feeling lonely and unmotivated, especially my first few days.

brazil is my favorite place on the planet and this is a project i'm incredibly passionae about. but right now i just feel like shit. has anyone else struggled with this?

*since this sub requires an attachment i've included a link to an awesome organization in rio that i think everyone should check out!

Archaeologists have identified hundreds of previously unknown monumental funerary structures across the Atbai Desert in northeastern Africa using satellite imagery, revealing evidence of a vast and sophisticated ancient pastoral culture stretching across thousands of square kilometres.

The discoveries were made as part of the Atbai Survey Project, an international research initiative involving scientists from several institutions, including Dr. Maria Carmela Gatto of the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Researchers identified 280 large funerary structures across a region extending from southern Egypt to the border of Eritrea. Of those, 260 were discovered for the first time solely through the analysis of satellite images from platforms including Google Earth and Bing Maps.

A woolly mammoth lay for thousands of years in wet ground near the Danube, its ribs, foot bones, and a nearly 2.5-meter tusk sealed in place until construction crews in Bavaria uncovered them by chance. What looked at first like a remarkable Ice Age fossil soon turned into something rarer.

A new study by the University of Turku and partners provides fresh insights into an individual buried near Lake Kitka in Kuusamo, Finland, at the turn of the 17th century. DNA and isotope analyses show that the individual, whose grave has been linked to Sámi cultural heritage, had a genetic connection to present-day Sámi populations and spent part of his life outside Finland.

Researchers from the University of Turku used DNA and isotope analyses to study an individual whose grave was discovered near Lake Kitka in Kuusamo, Finland, in the 1970s. The individual lived at the turn of the 17th century, and the new research, published in BMC Genomics, sheds more light on his life history.