Queendom.com released their Paranormal Beliefs test after collecting data from over 20,000 people from all walks of life. They uncovered gender, age, ethnic and other differences in views of the supernatural.

Their Paranormal Beliefs Test assessed a number of beliefs, including the afterlife, the concepts of fate and karma, and aliens. Although superstitions are no longer as prominent as they used to be – the two most prevalent superstitions were the belief that thinking negative thoughts can make something bad happen (24%), and that "jinxing" something can cause you to lose it (24%) – there are many paranormal aspects that people strongly supported.

The afterlife, religion, and karma were the most widespread beliefs, followed by the belief in fate and psychic phenomenon. Superstitions brought up the rear, while folklore/myths/legends, witchcraft, telekinesis, and existence of UFOs and aliens fell somewhere in the middle on people's belief system. Interestingly, women believed much more strongly in paranormal phenomenon than men did, particularly in terms of the idea of karma (average score for women 71, 57 for men). The only exception was that of aliens and UFOs, where men outscored women 52 to 49.

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"Quantum entanglement" may sound like an awful sci-fi romance flick, but it's actually a phenomenon that physicists say may someday lead to the ability to teleport an object all the way across the galaxy instantly.

It's not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation, where an object disappears then reappears somewhere else. Rather, it "entangles" two different atoms so that one atom inherits the properties of another.

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Consider the case of Jean, whose life was saved by her ginger cat Topsy. "Topsy always waits until I am settled and then jumps on to the bottom of my bed and goes to sleep himself," says Jean.

"But one night he started acting in a really bizarre way. He jumped on my bed before I had got in it, circled around and around and then jumped back off again. It was as if he was trying to tell me something. He kept jumping on and off and was really frantic. It was impossible to sleep because Topsy was making so much commotion.

"I got up and as I did I started to feel shaky, sweaty and dizzy. Then it hit me. I'm a diabetic and I had forgotten to check my blood sugar levels before I went to bed. When I did my glucose test it had fallen dangerously low. If I'd fallen asleep I could have lost consciousness or died. I wouldn't have made it through the night."

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Museum Victoria's head of science, Dr Mark Norman, has been studying octopuses, squids, cuttlefishes and nautiluses – otherwise known as the cephalopods – for more than two decades.

While Dr Nornam admits to being an Octopus Paul sceptic, he says the sea creature should not be underestimated.

"They're clever animals with big brains and they do amazing things," he said.

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Traffic officers in Nagpur, 870km west of Mumbai, have agreed to allow small pyramids to be placed at 10 accident-prone sites in the city to see if their claimed positive energy can reduce crashes.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Sahebrao Patil said the road safety initiative came about after a meeting with an expert in Vastu, an ancient Hindu system of construction which is similar to Chinese Feng Shui.

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Among the residents of the tiny town of Claremont, on the James River in Virginia, there is a long-standing tale: In the early 1900s, a little girl was killed — by whom, no one can say for sure — in the basement of the square, brick schoolhouse in the center of town. Soon after the murder, in 1919, the students had their photograph taken on the school's front lawn. In the photo, a couple dozen children are lined up on the grass. High above them in a second-floor window, against the darkness of the room beyond, there is someone else — a small figure alone in the frame, barely more than a white smudge but definitely readable, if one is so inclined, as a little girl.

Almost a century later, on a fall evening at dusk, John Warfield, paranormal investigator, stood in the same second-floor room of the building. Warfield, head of the ghost-hunting outfit D.C. Metro Area Ghost Watchers, had come to Claremont with a couple of his team members to investigate the schoolhouse, now the Claremont Town Hall, considered by some locals to be haunted. Warfield strode across the empty room to the windows, his footsteps echoing in the dimness.

"In the picture, her head came up to about here," he said, holding a hand partway up the window frame. "Which means she was my height. Unless," he added thoughtfully, "she wasn't touching the floor."

Ghost hunting, as Warfield approaches it, is a curious combination of procedural rigor and leaps of faith. During a typical investigation, he will use digital recorders and night-vision cameras to collects dozens, even hundreds of hours of audio recordings and video, all of which he sorts through himself. For Warfield, 41, a former Navy medic who took over DCMAG from its founder in 2006, his hobby is less about thrill seeking than an exercise in patience and persistence. It is his meticulous approach, he thinks, that sets him apart from less serious investigators — "a couple of people with a camera who go stomping around a graveyard." Read the rest of this article

As the Soviet system began to collapse under its own weight in the late 1980s, a widespread underground belief in magic and the paranormal flooded into the mainstream, turning society on its head. The pinnacle of this scramble for new ideas to replace the certainties that Marxism-Leninism had once provided saw the incredible spectacle of extrasensory experiments carried out on state TV, prime-time viewing spots devoted to psychic healing sessions.

Where once there were screenings of Communist Party congresses and rhythmic gymnastics, now there were men with hypnotic eyes and soothing voices promising to cure the entire country of its ailments. The nation was entranced.

Anatoly Kashpirovsky, who first came to public attention during a televised broadcast of a Kiev healing session in October 1989, was the most famous of these Kremlin-approved psychics. At the height of his celebrity, the former weightlifter and qualified psychiatrist regularly topped polls to find the most popular public figure, easily beating the still sober Boris Yeltsin into second place. His live appearances at venues from Moscow to Vladivostok saw crowds sobbing and writhing to his command, a mass casting-out of demons, Soviet-style.

"They idolise me," Kashpirovsky said of his countrymen at a 1989 joint news conference with a foreign ministry spokesperson. "I can reverse what was once thought irreversible. I tap the inner resources of the body." Read the rest of this article

CHIP Coffey was on his riding mower in the yard of his Atlanta-area home a couple of years ago when he came around the side of the house and saw his mother standing there, grinning at him.

Although he'd been praying for that moment for years, his initial reaction wasn't exactly joy.

"My first thought was, 'I've just had a freakin' stroke,'" Coffey, 55, recalled during a phone interview. "But I reached up and felt my mouth and it wasn't drooping. And it wasn't hot enough for me to have had a heat stroke… Read the rest of this article

One night some years ago, I had a dream with big production values. There were dancing girls and a host in a tux, pitching a new beverage–a mixture of milk and apple juice. When I awoke in the morning, my girlfriend at the time walked into the room holding a cup. "Try this, it's really good," she said, handing me her spur-of-the moment invention, a mixture of milk and apple juice. I had said nothing to her about my middle-of-the-night dream-commercial.

I've had enough highly unlikely occurrences in my life that "coincidence" fails to convince me as an overall explanation. And I'm hardly alone. There is no greater cultural gap than the widespread experiential acceptance of psychic phenomenon (psi), and its widespread, public rejection by academia. Scientists who do express an interest in the topic may even be subject to academic ostracism. Read the rest of this article