4 – Déjà Vu
- Ever felt like you’ve experienced the same moment twice? Or been to the same place before? Or experienced the same moment twice?
- Almost everyone will experience it once, or twice as it might seem. The most popular theories of déjà vu involve an anomaly or tiny disruption inside the brain when it thinks it’s remembering, but actually it’s experiencing new memories. It’s a subtle phenomenon with no known cause or cure, and can be pretty disorientating.
- Some people believe déjà vu is nothing more than ‘a glitch in the matrix’.
3 – Human Laughter
- Everyone has that something or someone that always makes them chortle, but why?
- Apart from signalling to another person that a situation is non-threatening or that a joke has been made, science doesn’t really have any one answer to why we ‘lol’ or ‘rofl’. Chimps have been observed panting when being furiously tickled, and orang-utans seem to apparently find magic tricks amusing. Whatever type of humour you have, laughter seems to just be a pleasant evolutionary bonus.
- All we know is that if you remove the laugh track from a sitcom, it gets pretty awkward to watch.
2 – Japanese Space Cherry Tree
- In 2008, a cherry blossom sapling that took a ride in space returned to earth and surprised scientists by sprouting up to 10 years ahead of its natural schedule.
- It is unknown whether cross-pollination, cosmic rays or even 4,100 spins around the earth on the International Space Station caused the plant’s accelerated growth. The original tree is growing in the Ganjoji Temple, Japan, where Buddhist monks say it is 1250 years old.
- This far out cherry tree offcut is now happily blossoming in the gravity of Gifu City in Japan.
1 – The Meaning of Life
- Some people believe that us humans are pretty special – in fact, they think we’re so special that there’s gotta be a higher reason we’re all here on this earth.
- Einstein believed the meaning of life is simply: to create satisfaction for ourselves and for other people. Some people say we were all put here by a magical creator. Philosophers have strived for millennia to put some sense to our existence, but science still can’t explain what our purpose is, if we have one at all.
Whether we’ve been put here to explore the cosmos, or to satisfy a deity in the sky, there is always the possibility the answer is in fact, 42.
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