Living in the public eye 24/7 can definitely have its downsides. For one, we can learn the most intimate details of a celebrity’s life without ever having met them. So it’s no surprise that some have been pretty open about their beliefs in the supernatural and reincarnation.

1. Helena Bonham Carter

No stranger to the weird and bizarre, Carter has a psychic friend on-call. Most recently they were used for de-ghosting her house and consulting about taking the role of Elizabeth Taylor in the BBC biopic “Burton and Taylor”.

“I told him I was in a real dilemma about the role, and he came back with the answer, ‘intellectually it makes no sense whatsoever, but emotionally it’s a nine out of ten’”. Her aunt is also an astrologer that she consults for advice as well.

2. Sammy Hagar

The former Van Halen frontman claims that he was visited by aliens as a boy and that aliens abducted him in 1967 to communicate telepathically.

“So I’m lying in bed. I feel like I’m dreaming that there are these little aliens- 2 guys sitting in this ship up on the hill behind us about 11 miles away… I could see that they had something plugged into me. I mean a wireless thing”. After the ordeal he woke up to white and then suddenly everything went black before he started shaking.

He also had a paranormal experience with his father. One night he awoke to a knock on his door where he saw his father visibly drunk, so he slammed the door in his face and told him to leave. A few minutes later he got a phone call from his sister saying their father had just died. It’s a shame we never got any Van Halen songs about these experiences.

3. Shirley MacLaine

You just have a list about celebrities and the supernatural without Oscar winner Shirley MacLaine. Continue reading →

Our memories are at the heart of who we are. Whether the memories have are painful or happy, they shape the person we become and help us make sense of the world around us. However, as we age our brains adhere to the entropic principle of the universe, meaning that we slowly begin to forget moments from our lives.

This ‘natural amnesia’ becomes a source of great sorrow and hurt for many people as they struggle to recall their childhood or how they felt during significant moments in their life. Whether memory loss is caused by a head injury, aging or a degenerative brain condition, such as Alzheimer’s, finding out how to get them back from locked compartments in our minds has puzzled scientists for centuries.

A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released a set of results from their memory study, which could begin to answer how we retrieve ‘lost’ memories.

The research team, led by Susumu Tonegawa, set out on the project to start answering an age old scientific question; were ‘lost’ memories caused by damage to specific brain cells, or by a ‘blockage’ in its storage?

‘Brain researchers have been divided for decades on whether amnesia is caused by an impairment in the storage of a memory, or in its recall,’ says Tonegawa. ‘The majority of researchers have favored the storage theory, but we have shown in this paper that this majority theory is probably wrong. Amnesia is a problem of retrieval impairment.’

The research itself was conducted on mice, which meant giving them amnesia. To do this the team shocked the rodents every time they entered a particular room in a maze – named chamber A. By doing this the mice would ‘freeze’ when they approached the room, as they remembered the previous shock.

By analyzing the mouse’s brain, the team was able to pinpoint the neurons that activated the memory of the shock. Once pinpointed the mice in one group were be given a chemical called anisomycin. This chemical inhibits the synaptic strength and prevents protein synthesis necessary for memory coding.

Continue reading →

Even the longest-lasting relationships can be broken down into their simple day-to-day components. By working on building healthy daily habits as a couple, you can unlock the secret to a long-term relationship.

Little things that you can do each day all add up over the course of the relationship and will either spread positivity and happiness, or negativity throughout your partnership. You can make the choice. You can form good habits, nourishing your relationship, and watch it flourish!

Habits, good and bad, take around 21 days to form, so by being vigilant in your daily practices and working together, you can form fantastic habits and have a long and healthy relationship. Take things one step at a time, introduce any of these that you don’t already do slowly and steadily, and start to reap the rewards!

1) Show One Another Respect

This is one of the most important daily habits you could form to create a long-lasting and healthy relationship. By outwardly expressing the respect you have for your partner, you show them that you truly value who they are.

Showing your partner you are willing to listen to them and that you understand them, is an expression of acceptance – you’re welcoming them into your life you are expressing your love and warmth for them. One of the fastest ways of doing this is simply saying “Thank you” to one another daily. Further, when you talk to each other, show that you are listening and understand what the other person has to say – these small gestures of respect can go a long way.

Most importantly, this respect expresses your love and warmth for them.

2) Go For A Walk

Getting out of the house together (but not for work) is ideal for fostering a healthy relationship. Not only does it get you both into the fresh air, giving you some light exercise, but it also promotes quality time together. You can talk together distraction-free, and break-up any feelings of staleness that can start to form when you spend evening after evening in the same room. See what your neighborhood has to offer and do it together! Continue reading →

One of the most significant moments in human understanding of the universe came when Copernicus looked up into the night sky and theorized that the earth wasn’t at the centre of the universe, or even our solar system. Instead, he correctly theorized (proven later by Galileo) that the earth orbited the sun. To us now it sounds ridiculous to consider otherwise but in 16th Century Europe this was revolutionary and blasphemous.

Copernicus has since been heralded as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of astronomy. However, new analysis of an ancient Mayan text, called the Dresden Codex, dating back to the tenth century has shown that European culture was lagging behind South America by nearly 500 years, and had in fact structured their entire society around astronomy.

Dresden Codex History

The Dresden Codex is the most significant text regarding Mayan understanding of space. Named after the Royal Library of Dresden where it mysteriously ended up in in the 1730s, the codex was considered indecipherable at first.

The first person to make headway into understanding the 39-page document was the German mathematician Ernst Förstemann, a man who knew nothing about Mayan history or culture but noticed the Mayan numerals in the text.

He successfully deduced that these numerals were measurements based on the movement of Venus. However, his theory couldn’t be proven until the mid 20th century when Mayan hieroglyphics were successfully translated.

Teeple and Förstemann were the first to see the intricacy and advanced astronomy of Mayan society. Their initial theories have both been proven and have recently been furthered by a team of science historian led by the University of California’s Gerardo Aldana. Continue reading →

Countless science-fiction and fantasy books and movies delve into the intriguing concept of parallel universes. The idea behind them probably began with the words: ‘what if…’

What if the world as we know it is not the only one in existence?

What if there are universes similar to ours that can support life?

What if they had technology more advanced than we can ever imagine?

What if they already found our planet?

What if they are already among us?

The Study of Alternate Worlds

The basic concept of parallel universes comes from the multiverse theories that physicists have been toying with for decades.

The conception of a world that hover just above ours was proposed by Neil Turok and Paul Steinhardt from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. The idea is the possibility of many dimensions to our world.

Brian Greene, a physicist from the Columbia University, describes the notion as “our universe is one of potentially numerous ‘slabs’ floating in a higher-dimensional space, much like a slice of bread within a grander cosmic loaf.”

This idea has been a mainstay for physicists who attempt to explain gravity, quantum mechanics, and other incomprehensible aspects of nature. For instance, Hugh Everett’s “many worlds” explanation of quantum mechanics is a legitimatized theory in physics. Continue reading →

Buddhist monks have been scanned many times by fMRI machines so neuroscientists can discover the source of empathy. After all, this is the emotion that connects human beings and builds relationships. We are undeniably affected by the feelings of those around us. Smiles are contagious, and misery loves company.

Tania Singer shocked everyone with her theory as she placed another Buddhist monk into the fMRI machine.

Her goal was how to avoid empathy.

An Emotional Virus Called Empathy

Imagine a nursery full of babies. If one bawls, all of them cry as well. They can’t differentiate between their own emotions and the emotions of those around them. Whatever an another baby is feeling, it is felt like a personal sensation.  As we develop, we learn to distinguish these emotions, yet that does not spare us from this contagion.

The distinction between our feelings and those around us is blurred in our minds.

At the University College London, in 2004, Singer and her team placed sixteen romantic couples into an MRI scanner. When they gave a painful electric shock to the subjects, this ignited activity in the region of the brain that reacts to physical pain, and the areas for emotion pain. Continue reading →