The News

Russia began bombing Ukrainian cities with Iranian-made Shahed drones in October 2022. Three and a half years later, Ukraine has turned that onslaught into an exportable advantage: low-cost interceptor drones, costing as little as $2,100 apiece, that now account for more than 70 percent of Shahed kills — and that the Pentagon, Gulf states, and NATO allies all want to buy.

Updated Yesterday

For six days, the United States and Israel have been bombing Iran under operations codenamed Epic Fury and Roaring Lion. Iran has struck back not just at Israel but at American bases scattered across the Persian Gulf — and in doing so, put French troops, British runways, and Turkish airspace in the crossfire. Now France has become the first major NATO ally to open its own military infrastructure to the American war effort, authorizing United States support aircraft to use the Istres air base in southern France, with the explicit condition that these planes stay out of offensive strikes on Iran.

Updated Yesterday

South Korea's stock market was the best performer among major economies in early 2026, riding a semiconductor boom that pushed the benchmark KOSPI index to an all-time high of 6,347 on February 27. Five days later, the index had lost nearly 20% of its value in the worst two-day crash in the country's history, triggered by the United States and Israel striking Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which 95% of South Korea's Middle Eastern oil imports flow.

Updated Yesterday

For nearly five decades, children born with Dravet syndrome—a severe genetic epilepsy that causes hundreds of seizures per month, cognitive decline, and a mortality rate between 15 and 20 percent—had no treatment that addressed the underlying cause. Every available drug, including two approved in the past eight years, could only partially suppress symptoms. On March 5, 2026, the New England Journal of Medicine published the first clinical evidence that a drug can modify the disease itself: zorevunersen, an antisense oligonucleotide that boosts protein production from the healthy copy of the gene responsible for the condition, reduced motor seizures by up to 91 percent in 81 children and sustained improvements in cognition and behavior over three years.

Updated Yesterday

China adopted five-year economic planning from the Soviet Union in 1953. Seventy-three years and fourteen plans later, the 15th Five-Year Plan unveiled at Beijing's annual Two Sessions on March 5, 2026, represents the clearest break from the growth-first model that powered China's rise since Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Under Xi Jinping, the plan elevates technological self-reliance and economic security, with $70 billion earmarked for semiconductor incentives, as Premier Li Qiang confirmed in his Government Work Report setting the 2026 GDP target at around 5%.

Updated Yesterday

For three decades, China's annual growth target was a formality — the economy nearly always blew past it. On March 5, Premier Li Qiang set the 2026 target at 4.5% to 5%, the lowest figure Beijing has published since it began the practice in the early 1990s. The downgrade from the previous three years' 'around 5%' signals that China's leadership now expects structurally slower expansion for the foreseeable future.

Updated Yesterday

The War Powers Resolution has been on the books for 53 years, designed to prevent exactly this: a president waging a major war without Congress voting to authorize it. On March 5, with American troops already engaged in combat against Iran and six service members dead, the Senate voted 47-53 to reject a resolution that would have required the president to obtain congressional approval before continuing military operations. One Republican, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted in favor. One Democrat, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against.

Updated Yesterday

It took thirteen years and $2.7 billion to read the first human genome. Now a single AI model, trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs from more than 128,000 species, can predict whether an uncharacterized mutation in a breast cancer gene is dangerous—with 90 percent accuracy—without ever being shown that gene. On March 4, the Arc Institute and NVIDIA published Evo 2 in Nature, the largest biological foundation model ever built: 40 billion parameters, a context window of one million nucleotides, and the ability to design synthetic genomes the size of a simple bacterium.

Updated Yesterday

Iraq has depended on Iranian gas for roughly a third of its electricity since the mid-2010s. On the evening of March 4, 2026, a sudden drop in gas supplies to the Rumaila power plant in southern Iraq triggered a loss of 1,900 megawatts, which cascaded through the national grid and shut down power to all 18 provinces. More than 44 million people went dark, hospitals lost grid power, and communications networks faltered, all while US and Iranian missiles were crisscrossing the region around them.

Updated 2 days ago

For four years, the question of whether Moderna owed billions for technology at the heart of its COVID-19 vaccine hung over the company. Less than a week before a jury trial was set to begin in Delaware, Moderna agreed to pay up to $2.25 billion to settle patent claims brought by Arbutus Biopharma and Genevant Sciences—accepting a court judgment that it infringed four patents and that those patents are valid. If the full amount is paid, it would be the largest disclosed patent settlement in pharmaceutical history, surpassing a $2.15 billion Pfizer-Takeda settlement in 2013.

Updated 2 days ago

In the 1950s, the province of Almería in southeastern Spain was one of the poorest in the country — a stretch of semi-arid scrubland receiving less than 250 millimeters of rain per year. Today, more than 40,000 hectares of plastic-covered greenhouses blanket the landscape, producing over 3.5 million tons of fruits and vegetables annually and generating more than €3.7 billion in revenue. The greenhouse complex is the largest human-made structure visible from space.

Updated 2 days ago

The Strait of Hormuz—one-fifth of global seaborne oil trade—remains completely shut down on March 5 after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) declared 'complete control' by its navy, slashing tanker traffic to near zero. Brent crude climbed to $83.12 per barrel (+2.1%) amid a deepening market rout, with U.S. stock futures plunging further and gold rallying. On day 6 of the crisis, Iranian drone strikes continue to halt QatarEnergy's liquefied natural gas (LNG) production at Ras Laffan and Mesaieed, spiking European gas futures 45-50% and compounding the supply shock.

Updated 2 days ago

For four decades, the United States and Iran avoided direct, large-scale war. That changed on February 28, 2026, when the US and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and leadership compounds, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The assault followed collapsed indirect nuclear talks mediated by Oman. Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks on US bases in the Gulf, oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the US Embassy in Riyadh.

Updated 2 days ago

For decades, finding a therapist who accepts insurance in the United States has been a contradiction: insurance plans technically cover mental health, but so few therapists participate in insurance networks that most patients either pay out of pocket or go without care. Grow Therapy, founded during the pandemic's mental health surge, has built an infrastructure layer that makes it easier for independent therapists to accept insurance—and it just raised $150 million at a $3 billion valuation, with roughly $1 billion in revenue and a network covering 220 million insured Americans.

Updated 3 days ago

Every time engineers double the data rate on a copper wire, electrical noise doubles too, cutting the usable cable length in half. That physics problem is now strangling the AI industry. As graphics processing units (GPUs) push toward 224 gigabits per second per lane, passive copper cables inside data centers can reach less than one meter before the signal degrades. Ayar Labs, a startup born from research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley, just closed $500 million in Series E funding at a $3.75 billion valuation to mass-produce chips that replace those copper links with light.

Updated 3 days ago

Ali Khamenei ruled Iran as supreme leader for 36 years until joint US-Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026, killed him along with his family members and at least seven top military and intelligence officials at his Tehran compound. The decapitation shattered Iran's command structure, prompting the Assembly of Experts—a body of 88 senior clerics—to convene an emergency session on March 1 for wartime succession. Acting leader Ali Larijani, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, faced immediate pushback from the military, which formed an interim command council to run operations independently.

Updated 3 days ago

Apple launched its Creator Studio subscription on January 28, 2026, for $12.99 monthly—about one-sixth Adobe Creative Cloud's price—bundling Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro. High-end M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models, long anticipated after base M5 debut in October 2025, finally arrived March 3 with up to 4x artificial intelligence performance over prior generation, Wi-Fi 7, and modular CPU/GPU architecture promising 25-30% gains over M4. The launch alongside refreshed MacBook Air M5 and Studio Displays fulfilled leaks from iOS betas and reseller stock signals in early February.

Updated 3 days ago

For decades, the United States military chose its weapons contractors and the contractors complied. Artificial intelligence changed that equation. On March 3, OpenAI and the Department of Defense amended a freshly signed AI contract to explicitly ban the use of the technology for domestic surveillance of American citizens—a concession the Pentagon had refused to grant Anthropic just days earlier, triggering that company's blacklisting from all federal agencies.

Updated 3 days ago

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared more than 1,250 artificial intelligence-enabled medical devices since it began tracking them — nearly all of them narrow systems that read scans or flag anomalies without ever speaking to a patient. On March 3, 2026, a startup called RecovryAI announced that the FDA granted Breakthrough Device Designation to its Virtual Care Assistants, making it the first patient-facing product built on a generative large language model (LLM) to enter the agency's accelerated review pipeline. The device is designed to be prescribed after joint replacement surgery, checking in with patients twice daily about sleep, activity, and diet, and escalating concerns to the surgical team.

Updated 3 days ago