Mehkurydiaries

There are numbers too large to be allowed to remain rumours. In Borgu, Niger State, residents say hundreds of people were abducted during coordinated attacks in August. Some estimate about 600. A youth association now says the number may be close to 700. The authorities have not supplied a verified figure. One month later, families are still asking the country to count the people it failed to protect. That should disturb us almost as much as the kidnapping itself. Counting is not paperwork performed after rescue. It is the beginning of rescue. You identify who is missing, where they lived, who saw them last, their ages, medical conditions and families. You build a record strong enough to resist forgetfulness. A person who has not been counted is easier for power to misplace. Nigeria is usually comfortable with large numbers. Billions are budgeted. Thousands of officers are deployed. Committees multiply faster than rabbits with government stationery. But when citizens disappea...

I have stopped treating likes as the only evidence that a post lived. Earlier today, I searched my name. A search engine introduced me back to myself: researcher, founder, writer, builder. The summary was not assembled from one viral moment. There was no viral moment. It was built from breadcrumbs. A paper here. A product there. A profile, a blog post, an argument, a public trail. Social media trains us to judge writing within minutes. A post limps towards six likes and is pronounced dead before dinner. Yet search works on a different clock. Google describes the process plainly: crawlers discover pages, indexing systems analyse their contents, and retrieval systems serve material judged relevant to a later query. Its AI search features also draw upon indexed web pages. A like is a reaction. An index is memory. That memory is neither perfect nor guaranteed. Search engines may ignore a page. AI systems may misunderstand it. A machine can repeat an error with excellent grammar and alarmin...

I once joked that when humanoid robots finally enter our homes, I would simply sign into my ChatGPT account and meet the same assistant in a body. The joke has refused to remain a joke. Home humanoids are no longer waiting politely inside science fiction. 1X says its NEO robot will begin entering consumer homes in 2026. It is built to learn household tasks and can receive remote expert supervision when its autonomy meets its limits. The obvious story is that robots have acquired hands and legs. The stranger story is that they may also acquire our history. If a future humanoid can inherit the assistant account already living on your phone, it will not meet you as a stranger. It may arrive knowing your unfinished projects, recurring jokes, preferred tone and the peculiar hour at which your mind starts producing book titles instead of sleep. The machine may need a map of the kitchen. It may not need an introduction to you. We usually locate identity inside a body. Artificial intell...

At an AI conference in Rome this week, Pope Leo called for artificial intelligence to be guided by wisdom and charity—to serve human dignity and strengthen the bonds between people. Some will hear pious decoration. It is closer to a design requirement. Intelligence tells us how to do something. Wisdom asks whether it should be done. Charity asks who may be crushed while we are congratulating ourselves for doing it efficiently. History contains many efficient cruelties. Their paperwork was often excellent. The modern world has accumulated astonishing intelligence. We can model diseases, predict behaviour, move money in milliseconds and direct machines from continents away. Yet wars remain, propaganda improves and hunger survives beside abundance. Our problem is not always insufficient information. Sometimes we know exactly what we are doing. Artificial intelligence will magnify human goals. It does not automatically purify them. Give it medicine and it may help find a treatmen...

The Science Summit opens in Nairobi today with a serious ambition: to place African scientific leadership at the heart of the global agenda. Africa has never lacked questions. It has lacked sustained control over which questions receive money. UNESCO’s latest data puts research and development spending in Sub-Saharan Africa at 0.38 percent of GDP. The global figure is 1.92 percent. That gap is not merely a budget problem. It is a power arrangement. The person funding a question often influences which problem becomes scientifically visible. When the topic, method, timetable and expected result arrive inside the grant call, the local researcher can become a field assistant in his own continent. We export samples and import conclusions. A microscope does not become African because it cleared customs. This is not an argument against international collaboration. Science grows by crossing borders. Isolation would be expensive foolishness wearing a sovereignty badge. But collabora...

On September 28, 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed that mould had cleared bacteria from part of a culture plate. Humanity had found penicillin. Other scientists later turned that observation into medicine. We then behaved as though the miracle came with unlimited refills. Antibiotics changed the meaning of an infected wound. They made surgery safer, protected vulnerable patients and rescued ordinary people from bacteria that once turned small injuries into funerals. Then convenience began eating the gift. We take antibiotics for illnesses they cannot treat. We change doses or stop treatment without medical advice. In places where diagnosis is scarce, guessing often arrives before testing. Hospitals, farms, pharmacies, prescribers, manufacturers and patients all add pressure to the same invisible classroom. The pupils are bacteria. Resistance is not bacteria becoming wicked. It is evolution doing its work. An antibiotic kills susceptible bacteria. The survivors carry useful defences, re...