Mehkurydiaries

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...

In a remote village in Enugu State, I taught Basic Science and Basic Technology to junior secondary students. The curriculum contained electricity, ecosystems, machines and materials. The children were not short of intelligence. They were often short of explanations that remembered where they were starting from. That classroom taught me something: complexity is sometimes unavoidable. Confusion is not. DNA is complex. A power grid is complex. So is a national budget, a software architecture or a doctrine of faith. Serious subjects have layers. But layers are not fog. Some experts wear obscurity like ceremonial clothing. The audience leaves confused, and the speaker leaves feeling profound. Fog is not altitude. Research on cognitive load shows that poor instructional design can consume mental capacity needed for learning. Jargon can do something similar: it forces the reader to spend strength opening the box before meeting the idea inside it. This does not mean every truth must be red...

The United Nations has 193 member states. The room is crowded. The key ring is not. At this year’s General Assembly, more than 150 leaders spoke beneath a theme about restoring trust. Africa again asked for permanent representation on the Security Council. The answer, as usual, arrived dressed as sympathy and walking at the speed of procedure. The Security Council has fifteen members. Ten rotate. Five—the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France—never leave. Each holds veto power. The world calls this multilateralism. The furniture remembers 1945. Africa has 54 UN member states and roughly 1.6 billion people. Yet no African country holds a permanent seat where binding decisions on sanctions, peace operations and international security are made. This is not merely a seating arrangement. Calling African states after decisions have been shaped is consultation. Allowing them to help shape those decisions is power. The difference is the entire argument. The African Union’s model d...

France spent decades teaching religion to leave through the front door. It has now found young adults knocking at the side door. More than 13,000 adults were baptised in the Catholic Church in France at Easter 2026. The official figure—13,234—is 28 percent higher than in 2025 and more than triple the number recorded in 2016. This does not mean secular France has suddenly become a monastery. One Easter is not a census, and a baptismal queue is not proof that every pew will remain occupied. Still, the increase deserves more than a shrug. Inherited religion is weakening. Chosen religion may be stirring. That distinction matters. A person baptised as an adult has usually crossed questions, suspicion and inconvenience to reach the font. The French bishops’ survey found that 40 percent of catechumens began seeking baptism after an ordeal triggered a search for meaning. Pain remains an excellent theologian. It asks questions comfort postpones. Modern society has liberated people from many r...

For more than sixty years, a coral system off Benin existed under an unfortunate scientific condition: presumed dead. The corals had first been reported during surveys in 1963 and 1964. Their ecological condition remained unknown, but the reef structures were treated as lifeless. Then researchers returned. Between April and December 2025, a team used side-scan sonar and underwater cameras to examine the Benin continental shelf. At a depth of 54 metres, the cameras found living coral communities attached to rocky substrate. The ocean had not submitted a resurrection certificate. Our knowledge had simply arrived late. The study documented at least six forms of octocoral, two black-coral taxa and eight associated fish species. It also corrected the older picture: this was not evidence of one unbroken coral barrier, but discrete patches forming a deep coral garden. Science became more accurate because someone distrusted an old obituary. There is a larger lesson here, though it must not b...