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 →

Bursting open like literal land mines, China’s watermelons are under severe strain with their current wet weather and the overdose of growth chemicals they have been covering them in. China has stunned us all with their expectations of bigger, more profitable fruit by spraying their crops with a growth accelerator known as forchlorfenuron.

Around 20 farmers situated around Danyang city in Jiangsu lost up to 115 acres of watermelons due to this crisis. According to the U.S. EPA – “Forchlorfenuron is a cytokin which improves fruit size, fruit set, cluster weight and cold storage in grapes in kiwifruits.”

Professor Wang Liangju with the College of Horticulture at Nanjing Agricultural University believes that these problems occurred as they were improperly used.

He disclosed to The Associated Press that the chemicals were used too late into the season, causing bolting of the fruits. He also claimed that the variety of fruit grown could be the cause, stating that a thin skinned variety was grown which has actually been nicknamed the “exploding melon”, known for splitting. Continue reading →

Many years ago, we were on holiday and my family had the perfect weekend planned. We were going to go to the beach pretty much every day, get ice cream and visit the local curio shops. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of a sunny week like that? I woke the next morning to pretty much what I could describe as a tropical storm. “You can’t control the weather” was what my grandmother muttered.

According to new studies, there is, in fact, a way to control the weather, well some of it. Cloud seeding may assist by decreasing the severity of hail storms or for example, increase rainfall. This could very well be of a great benefit to drought stricken or storm battered areas. Earth’s climate is forever changing, so why not find a way to keep the conditions just right?

In essence, a process where planes fitted with emitters pass through clouds, which are then injected with silver iodide which induces precipitation. Around since the 1940’s, the success has been debatable.

The process is pretty simple – the silver iodide acts to catalyze water droplets in the cloud, resulting in rain or hail. Used for quite a number of years, cloud seeding has statistically reduced storm severity by up to 27 percent according to one of the success stories in Alberta. Continue reading →