The AI Frontier Asks to Be Paced: Anatomy of a Panic

ON September 8, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon, a few months into a job at Anthropic (a leading US AI company) after three years at OpenAI, announced his resignation on X. "Neither company is acting responsibly," he wrote. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Within a day, the post had been read more than 100 million times.

Map Wars: the Victory of Equal Earth over an Unequal One

LAST week, on 4th September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another. It is an attempt to correct the view of the world that comes from the widely used world map based on the Mercator Projection, the work of Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century Flemish cartographer. The problem with the Mercator Map is well known; for example, it shows the island of Greenland as the same size as the African continent, even though Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland!

Nepal Flash Flood & Disasters around the Third Pole

THE sudden and catastrophic flash flood that hit Nepal near its border with Tibet-China on 26 August has claimed at least 1200 lives at the time of writing, with an estimated 3900-4800 people still unaccounted for. Indians form the largest national cohort of victims, chiefly due to the on-going pilgrimage to Kailash-Mansarovar in Tibet.

India in Space: ISRO, Private Sector and Prospects

NATIONAL Space Day was observed in India on 23 August commemorating the historic successful soft landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the south polar region of the Moon. The Moon landing in 2023, the fourth ever by any nation, marked a big leap in India’s space journey.

Ebola: No Problem, Until it Heads North?

TWO months ago, two articles were published here on the Ebola outbreak unfolding in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) about the forgotten frontline and global consequences. Back then, the tally was brutal enough: 896 confirmed cases, 232 dead. As of 17 August 2026, we are staring at 4,945 cases and 2,325 deaths. It is already past the 2,299 who died in the 2018–2020 outbreak. The virus is not remaining confined. It has now spread to 54 health zones in six provinces, well beyond the original three hotspots.

The Emerging Geography of Science: China in the Middle?

IN June 2026, The Nature Index, one of the most well-regarded barometers of high-quality research, issued the annual Research Leaders rankings. It made the academic community sit up and take note. Harvard University slid from first place to third for the first time in 10 years, behind China's Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Chinese institutions now occupy nine of the top 10 overall slots. This would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.

The Digital Dragnet at Jantar Mantar: Surveillance as State Policy

ON July 20, 2026, lakhs of students and young people assembled at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party and Left student organisations - SFI, AISA and AISF, demanding accountability for the recurring NEET paper leaks that have driven dozens of students to suicide. The state's visible response was brutal enough: lathi charges, tear gas grenades fired directly into dense crowds, and plastic pellet rounds that left over 180 protesters injured and at least 42 hospitalised with compound fractures and pellet lacerations.

A New, Digital Generation Takes Over the Public Space

THE Cockroach Janata Party may have started as a satirical takeoff on Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s unfortunate remarks of May 15th this year on unemployed youth. But in a few months, it has transformed the national political space in a way that we could never have imagined a few months back. A witty response from Dipke to the Chief Justice’s remarks the next day, "What if all cockroaches come together?" drew a huge response.

Seizing the New Printing Press: Why Our Movements Must Learn to Use AI

ON MAY 16, 2026, the São Paulo bookshop of Expressão Popular, the publishing house of Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST), was packed with farmers, agroecology technicians and movement organisers. They had gathered for the launch of IARAA, an artificial intelligence platform for agrarian reform and agroecology. The tool was not built by a technology corporation.

Open Biology and AI: Need for the Global South

ON 9 July 2026, researchers from US universities published a paper in the top-rated journal Science describing a powerful new AI tool for biomedical research. A year earlier, they had made the initial manuscript available as open access to all by publishing it on bioRxiv, an online repository, and making the software available on GitHub, an online platform for researchers to share code.

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