Latest articles from our blog - Page 32
From Alan Turing's 1950 question "Can machines think?" to the era of ChatGPT and large language models, artificial intelligence has traveled a remarkable 75-year journey filled with euphoric breakthroughs and bitter winters. This article traces how symbolic AI, expert systems, neural networks, deep learning, and the transformer revolution each shaped the AI we know today.
Why is Christmas on December 25th? The Bible never specifies a date for Jesus's birth, yet the whole world celebrates on this day. From the theological calculations of the early church and Roman solar festivals to the German origins of the Christmas tree and the Dutch roots of Santa Claus — the story of how Christmas became what it is today stretches across two thousand years of history.
The history of jewelry stretches back at least 150,000 years to shell beads found in Morocco. From Sumerian gold necklaces to Egyptian signet rings and the Roman 'vena amoris' belief, every civilization has left its mark on how we adorn ourselves — including the origins of wearing a wedding ring on the fourth finger.
The jiangshi — a stiff, hopping corpse that feeds on qi rather than blood — was born from China's deep-rooted beliefs about proper burial, ancestral land, and the fate of souls lost far from home. From the Qing Dynasty scholars who first documented these tales, through the eerie corpse-walking traditions of Xiangxi province, to the explosive Hong Kong cinema boom of the 1980s that brought the hopping vampire to the world, the jiangshi is a window into centuries of Chinese thought on death, the soul, and the bonds between the living and the dead.
Mummies are far more than Egyptian burial curiosities wrapped in linen. From the world's oldest artificially preserved bodies in Chile's Atacama Desert to Japan's self-mummified Buddhist monks, humanity has found remarkably diverse ways to preserve the dead — and modern science is now revealing the remarkable secrets locked inside these ancient remains.