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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as New test for lung cancer and published under the headline Predict and prevent.

Cancer prevention has usually meant reducing exposure to known risks, such as smoking and air pollution. A new study points toward a more targeted approach: use a blood test to identify people whose biology suggests that lung cancer is beginning to develop, then give them an existing anti-inflammatory drug before a tumour forms.

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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as When AI builds itself and published under the headline Over and over.

Artificial intelligence is no longer merely helping people use software. It is increasingly helping researchers build better AI. Anthropic says its Claude system wrote more than four-fifths of the code the company published in May, up from a negligible share before Claude Code launched in early 2025. Independent benchmarks also suggest that leading models can now complete software tasks that would occupy a human engineer for more than a working day.

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The article argues that the AI boom has given Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan a deceptive sense of strength. Demand for chips, servers, and memory has lifted exports, profits, and headline growth across north-east Asia. Yet the same boom is narrowing their industrial base and hiding weakness in older manufacturing sectors that once powered the region’s rise.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 30th, 2026 Europe article listed in the contents as The pope and AI and published under the headline Of God and Claude.

Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is presented as much more than a routine Vatican statement on modern life. The Economist reads it as an attempt to open a major philosophical fight with Silicon Valley’s most expansive vision of artificial intelligence. The document ranges widely, touching journalism, diplomacy, slavery and just-war doctrine. But the article argues that its central target is the unregulated development of AI and, more deeply, the idea that technology should remake or surpass human beings.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 31st, 2026 Essay article listed in the contents as Modern war and published under the headline The crucible of transparency.

War in the age of exposure

The article argues that modern war is being reshaped by a new, incomplete but powerful form of battlefield visibility. Soldiers, vehicles, aircraft, missile launchers and command posts are harder to hide than before because cheap sensors, satellites, drones, software networks and precision weapons are knitting the battlefield together. The result is not omniscience. Fog, deception, jamming and geography still matter. But armies now fight under more eyes, and those eyes can often be connected quickly to weapons.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 31st, 2026 Finance & economics Buttonwood column listed in the contents as Giga-IPOs and published under the headline The incredible shrinking stockmarket.

A strong market with fewer public companies

The article argues that America’s stockmarket can look triumphant and diminished at the same time. Major indices are at record highs, but the public market itself is thinner than it used to be. The number of initial public offerings has fallen sharply from the pace of the 1990s, and the count of listed American companies has dropped from about 8,000 in 1996 to roughly 3,900 last year.

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The managerial problem behind AI anxiety

The article treats a badly phrased corporate comment as a useful case study in a broader management problem. Standard Chartered’s chief executive, Bill Winters, drew criticism after describing automation as replacing “lower-value human capital” with financial capital. The backlash was predictable, not because the bank was wrong to talk about automation, but because the language made people sound like assets to be sorted into valuable and disposable categories.

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A boom with a hollow center

The article argues that north-east Asia’s most advanced economies are enjoying a headline boom that hides a deeper industrial problem. Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan look strong because artificial intelligence has created huge demand for chips, servers, and the machinery and materials needed to make them. Taiwan’s economy is growing at a pace more typical of a fast-developing country than a rich one. South Korean corporate profits have surged. Japanese exporters are also doing better than the broader economy.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 31st, 2026 Science & technology Well Informed article listed in the contents as Electrolytes and published under the headline You probably don't need extra electrolytes.

Electrolyte drinks sell a simple promise: better hydration in a bottle. The article’s answer is more conditional. Electrolytes matter enormously to the body, but most healthy people already get enough of them from ordinary food and water. The drinks are useful in specific circumstances, not as an everyday upgrade to hydration.

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DEET is treated as the dependable baseline of mosquito defence, but the article highlights a more awkward fact: the insects are not just chemical machines. They can learn. If a mosquito encounters the smell of DEET at the same time as a successful meal, the repellent may stop being merely a warning signal and start becoming part of the route to food.