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This summary covers The Economist’s April 11th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as The evolution of breathing and published under the headline This calls for bubbles.

The article explains a seemingly obscure but important evolutionary shift: how animals moved from the cheek-based breathing used by amphibians to the rib-assisted breathing used by reptiles and mammals. A new paper in Nature, based on unusually well-preserved fossil reptiles, suggests that this transition happened at roughly the same time vertebrates were learning to walk properly on dry land, at least 290m years ago.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s April 11th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as A dangerous new AI and published under the headline Mythical monster.

The article argues that warnings about AI danger are usually worth treating with skepticism, because frontier labs have incentives to dramatise their own progress. This time, though, The Economist thinks the warning may be genuine. Its focus is Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, which the company says is powerful enough at discovering and exploiting software flaws that it should not yet be released broadly.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s April 11th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Curing all diseases with AI and published under the headline Panacea seer.

The article is built around a large claim: that artificial intelligence may eventually become a general-purpose engine for inventing new medicines, rather than just a tool for speeding up narrow research tasks. The immediate focus is Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, and his spin-off company Isomorphic Labs. The broader point is that AI drug discovery is moving from promise and publicity towards something more concrete: actual candidate drugs that can be tested in the real world.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s April 11th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as AI mathematicians and published under the headline One step at a time.

The article argues that artificial intelligence is becoming useful not just for crunching numbers, but for doing one of mathematics’ slowest and most exacting jobs: turning ideas and draft arguments into proofs that other mathematicians can formally verify. The promise is not that AI has suddenly become a replacement for mathematicians. It is that AI may help remove a trust bottleneck that has long slowed the field.

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A Windfall With an Expiry Date

The article looks at the Iran war from the perspective of American oil and gas producers and argues that the industry’s apparent good fortune is real but fragile. At the CERAWeek conference in Houston, high oil prices and global anxiety created an atmosphere that bordered on celebration. If crude stays around \$100 a barrel, American producers stand to make a great deal of money. The article cites estimates of more than \$60bn in extra gains over a year, while liquefied-natural-gas exporters also benefit from the disruption of Qatari supply. In the narrowest short-term sense, the war is good business for the industry.

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A Fuel Shock That Reorders Corporate Fortunes

The article argues that the Iran war’s oil shock is doing more than lifting headline inflation or making drivers angry at the pump. It is rapidly redrawing the map of corporate winners and losers. When oil rises from roughly \$60 a barrel to around \$100, and petrol moves from about \$3 a gallon to \$4, the effect is not evenly spread. Some businesses get an immediate windfall. Others are squeezed twice over: first by higher operating costs, then by consumers who have less money left for everything else.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s March 28th, 2026 Europe article listed in the contents as The internet in Russia and headlined on the page as Spring offensive.

The article argues that Russia’s leadership is trying to turn internet access into another instrument of wartime control. Security services have begun blocking mobile internet and moving against Telegram not because Russia feels secure, but because the regime feels exposed. In trying to seal the country off from outside influence, the Kremlin is disrupting daily life in its biggest cities and alarming parts of its own elite.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s March 28th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as The EU's merger dilemma and headlined on the page as Seeking scale.

The article asks whether looser EU merger rules will finally let European firms bulk up enough to challenge American and Chinese rivals. Its answer is sceptical. Europe does have a competitiveness problem, but the article argues that mergers are mostly being asked to solve the wrong problem. The deeper obstacles are fragmented markets, national political resistance and sector-specific rules that keep firms boxed inside their home countries.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s March 28th, 2026 Science & technology Well Informed article on page 79, which asks whether playing music is good for the brain and answers that it probably is.

The article’s basic point is not that musicians are magical or that music lessons guarantee genius. It is that making music is an unusually demanding mental task. It asks the brain to coordinate hearing, sight, timing, fine motor control, attention and imagination all at once. Done regularly, that seems to act like a form of training that can leave measurable cognitive benefits behind.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s March 28th, 2026 United States article on pages 20-21, listed in the contents as Going on cyber-offence under the Cyber-security heading.

The article argues that America’s new cyber-strategy marks a real shift in emphasis. Washington still talks about strengthening digital defences, but it is now much more explicit about disrupting threats before they hit American networks. The piece treats that as a consequential change in posture, while warning that offensive ambition may be outrunning the state’s ability to defend its own systems well.