Technology

New Archaeological Findings Tracing 9000-Year Old Domestic Pigs in China   The beginning of February, 2019 saw exciting archaeological discoveries and studies in China that the countrywas one of the earliest places in the world to domesticate pigs about 9,000 years ago. “Our research confirms that pig bones excavated from the Jiahu （贾湖）relic site in Wuyang （舞阳）County, central China’s Henan Province, date back 9,000 years and belong to domestic pigs,” said Yuan Jing, a researcher with the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Foreign scholars have found remains of domestic pigs from around the same period…

In the Spanish Inquisition, people who did not accept the rigid precepts of the ruling church were brutally persecuted and eliminated with the purpose of preserving the prevailing orthodoxy. Today, things are a bit less gruesome, but people are still willing to attack each other viciously based on difference of opinion about what should be the rules. Mind you, in recent times we had to grapple with new phenomena in the media that made us doubt not only what is true and what not, but even what truth itself actually is. In this case, the debate is about what should…

Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University, was also the chief economist of the IMF from 2001 to 2003. In early October, he wrote an article about Bitcoin which showed enough insight to the matter. In the article, he observed that “China’s government, concerned about the use of Bitcoin in capital flight and tax evasion, has recently banned Bitcoin exchanges. Japan, on the other hand, has enshrined Bitcoin as legal tender, in an apparent bid to become the global centre of fintech. The United States is taking tentative steps to follow Japan in regulating fintech, though…

What is Blockchain? What is the “Byzantine” problem in relation to Blockchain Technology? In which way is this technology helping human beings gain trust in health care and more? Read the brilliant article by Sascha Mundstein. Blockchain technology is a unique and unexpected combination of three subject areas: Internet, cryptography and game theory. The first two of these disciplines are obvious: Blockchain works over a decentralized peer-to-peer network on the Internet, and encryption technologies are known to play an important role in ensuring the authenticity of data. But what about the game theory? And what does this have to do…