The lush Tanjore city was the capital of Chola Emperors, before 1000 years. Among all the architectural wonders of the Cholas, the Tanjore Brihadeeswarar temple is their masterpiece. The temple was built by the great Raja Raja Chola, who was an avid devotee of Lord Shiva and arts and architecture of Dravidians.

Although many researches had been carried out to know the facts behind the temple construction, all of them went vain.

In the name of progress, human civilization, during its period of Renaissance, began to orient its political and economic philosophies toward the establishment of financial and commercial entities. Since then, these entities have now morphed into the most powerful corporations on the face of the Earth.

But behind these large corporations and beyond the complicated framework of politics and business, there lies, according to some people, a hidden dominating force that controls the world’s political, economic and military systems. And at the helm of this unnoticeable hegemonic power, there are allegedly five influential families that constructed the current world as we know it according to their design and continues to dictate its ways without the notice of the common man.

And so, according to some historians, scholars and many conspiracy theorists, here are five of the most powerful families that control the world today.

The story of the Rothschild Family is one of money, and its beginning can be traced back to the 18th century, to the rise of the financial genius that was Mayer Amschel Rothschild. From an apprentice at a small bank in Hamburg, Mayer Rothschild rose to become a prominent figure in the international transactions and manipulation of money. Eventually, he installed each of his five sons to be his agents in the five major financial centers of Europe, and their sons were also sent to other financial centers to head new offices.

Throughout the 19th century, the Rothschilds were responsible for stabilizing the currencies of major world governments, a role now fulfilled by the International Monetary Fund. While they provided important international service, they also profited heavily from it. At the height of their family’s business empire, the Rothschilds’ wealth would have been the largest single fortune in world history.

However, according to some conspiracy theorists, the Rothschilds, driven by their quest for money, have orchestrated the assassination of US Presidents and created every war since the 1800s to finance both sides and profit from such conflicts. Some even claim that the Rothschilds funded the operations of Nazi Germany and caused the Holocaust. There also those who claim that they were the true figure behind the creation of Israel.

Since then, it is believed that the Rothschild family has remained at the top of the world’s oligarchy system, and maintains a powerful and determining influence on the US Federal Reserve, and the British financial system.

In the 19th century, John Davidson Rockefeller effectively started to solidify his American empire after buying out several partners who owned Cleveland’s largest oil refinery in 1865. Later on, this became the foundation for the formation of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio in 1870, and John D. Rockefeller established a large monopoly on the industry the controlled around 90 percent of America’s pipelines and refineries. However, some historians say that labeling Standard Oil as a monopoly is an understatement, downplaying the covert and savage tactics utilized by John Rockefeller to maintain its control over American oil.

In 1911, the Rockefellers’ monopolistic oil company was broken up under anti-trust legislation, but the family continued to retain a large share of the business and continued to profit from it. According to Forbes, at the time of John D. Rockefeller’s death in 1937, his net worth amounted to as much as $340 billion in today’s money, around four times more than that of Bill Gates.

Since their financial prime in the early 20th century, the family’s wealth has dwindled down to an estimated combined net worth of $11 billion. Nevertheless, the Rockefeller family is the subject of various conspiracy theories. They allegedly committed such atrocious acts as funding the invention of the Zika virus, funding patentable pharmaceutical medical model to crush natural medicine and cures, orchestrating the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and for being the hidden force behind the destruction of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks.

One prevailing conspiracy theory about the Rockefeller family is their association with the idea of a secret global government, called the New World Order. They have been accused of establishing institutions such as the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group among other organizations to advance their interests nationally and globally.

Panic swept the nation back in 1893 partly because the flow of the country’s surplus gold to foreign nations put the U.S. economy in danger. Following his father’s footsteps in the baking industry, Morgan seized the opportunity to save the economy by restoring the confidence in the dollar and rescuing the gold standard.  To do this, Morgan led a syndicate of bankers, which included the Rothschild, to see U.S. bonds to buy back gold from foreign investors.

According to some people, that gold and bond exchange allowed Morgan to control the U.S. gold supply, which in turn, gave him the flexibility to finance the creation of U.S. Steel and gain control of the emerging electric light industry by forming General Electric. Morgan accomplished these feats by employing unethical and cutthroat business practices, which involved the elimination of competition, slashing jobs and reducing wages, and neglecting workplace safety – a greedy process which became known as “morganization.”

There are also those who believe that America entered World War I, not for political and policy concerns, but for the profits of the banking and munitions industries. Apparently, U.S. banks, including Morgan’s, lent over 100 times as much money to allied countries than they had to their adversaries. To protect those loans and their interests, financiers like Morgan urged the Wilson administration to aid their allies by participating in the war.

At present, rumors suggest a far-too-comfortable relationship between what is now the leading global financial services firm JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the U.S. Federal Reserve. There is even a theory that a tunnel exists connecting the two gold vaults of the New York Fed and JPM, and allegations that the Morgan family is heavily involved with war profiteering.

The Du Pont family is an American family descended from Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, and has been one of the richest families in the country. Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours was a French economist who emigrated from France in 1800 to the United States with his sons, Victor Marie du Pont and Éleuthère Irénée du Pont.

Éleuthère Irénée du Pont initially established E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, commonly referred to as DuPont, as a gunpowder manufacturer, which eventually became a chemical empire responsible for ubiquitous inventions such as nylon, Teflon, and Kevlar, and many other polymers.

DuPont became the largest supplier of gunpowder to the U.S. military in the early 1800s, and soon enough, it began manufacturing dynamite in incredible proportions. However, its monopoly on the industry was broken up under the Sherman Antitrust Act. But just like J.P. Morgan, the Du Pont family still managed to maintain dominance over the munitions industry, having supplied nearly 40 percent of all munitions used by Allied forces during the First World War.

DuPont also played a significant role in the development of the Manhattan Project and the production of the first atomic bomb during the Second World War, designing, building and operating the Hanford plutonium-producing plant in Washington. DuPont also reportedly produced as much as 4.5 billion pounds of military explosives used over the course of that war. Then in 1950, DuPont agreed to build the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina in cooperation with the effort to create a hydrogen bomb.

Rumors still circulate about DuPont’s involvement in the prohibition of hemp and cannabis in 1937 to protect its breakthrough patent for nylon and its process of using wood pulp to make paper. Since hemp could efficiently replace both products, some argue that it would have severely limited DuPont’s massive profits if it wasn’t prohibited.

The Bush family is considered as among the newest family to join the world elite and began their legacy with Prescott Sheldon Bush, a US banker and senator who was accused of obscenely profiting from the Second World War, and for establishing businesses with large corporations that financed Adolf Hitler’s government.

Documents declassified in 2003 revealed that Yale University’s Skull & Bones Society member Prescott Sheldon Bush – father of U.S. President George H.W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush – could have been prosecuted for providing aid and comfort to the country’s enemy by engaging in nefarious business dealings prior, during, and after World War II.

As reported by The Guardian back in 2004, the National Archives documents “show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, [Prescott Bush] worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power.”

Prescott’s descendants have not escaped scrutiny as well, having been accused of utilizing their power during their stint as the commander-in-chief of the United States to profit from the wars the country participated in. Conspiracy theorists even went so far as to claim that George W. Bush knew of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks and used it to justify a preemptive attack on a nation that has not attacked the United States in the name of a much broader war against terrorism.

To many conspiracy theorists, these five powerful families are the puppet masters that hold the strings of the highest echelons of society. With their immense wealth, unlimited resources, and far-reaching influence, these families have been rumored to have occult satanic connections, a secret network in the gold trade, a mysterious and not-so-well-intentioned agenda, and a secret plan to establish a new world order.

Whether these accusations indeed have a grain of truth in them or not have yet to be either summarily proven or thoroughly debunked. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there is a clear socio-economic disparity that places a great divide between the citizens of the world, and an overall political and economic climate that favors the wants of the select few over the needs of the many.

GIVEN the remarkable degree of understanding that science now provides about the physical world, it is easy to lose sight of the numerous, enormous unsolved mysteries that still haunt the dreams of scientists. Below is a list of some of the greatest of these unanswered questions which perhaps, with luck, will be answered (in part or in full) in the next hundred years. This list is by no means all inclusive, as there are important enigmas that remain in nearly every branch of science.

1. Dark Matter

We still have little understanding of dark matter, the strange and non-interacting material that seems to make up about 22% of the energy of our entire universe. We can infer its existence through its gravitational effects (which, for example, alter the properties of galaxies), but we have yet to detect it directly (though there are currently attempts underway to do so). If scientists are correct about dark matter’s existence, then it seems our own milky way galaxy has much more dark matter than other types of matter. There are a variety of theories now competing to describe what dark matter is composed of, but whatever it is it interacts so little with its environment that it can easily pass through our planet and our bodies without us being able to tell the difference.

2. Dark Energy

We still have very little idea about the nature of dark energy (which, despite its name, is unrelated to dark matter), a form of energy thought to permeate all of space. Dark energy appears to be required by theory in order to account for the idea that our universe has an accelerating rate of expansion (contradicting the old belief that gravity should be causing our universe’s growth to slow).

MATHEMATICS is often thought to be universally and unassailable true. I have even heard it argued that God, omnipotent though He may be, could not make math false even if He was impulsive enough to try it. Can mathematicians actually prove that math is true? If they cannot, does the fact that math is so useful in solving real world problems provide evidence of its truth? And, if mathematics is not true, then does that imply that conclusions drawn from it are faulty or suspect? These are some of the questions that I will try to address.

The first attempt we might make to prove that mathematics is true is to consider real world situations where mathematical equations seem to appear. Some examples are:

• If I have three red balls in a bag and add two more, the bag will then contain five red balls.

• If I am on a train traveling at three miles per hour and throw a ball at two miles per hour

In life, we only truly get to experience one perspective: our own. but we often wonder how the world looks through the eyes of, say, a deer. Or a dragon fly. Or a frog. Or an owl. I know I do!

The virtual forest rendering they’ve created allows you to experience the woods as some animals would.

Check out the video below for a real experience of life through the eyes of an animal.