Science & Tech

India has updated vehicle rules to expressly include E100 in high-ethanol emission certification. The change supports certified flex-fuel vehicles and raises important questions about compatibility, energy security and sustainable ethanol production.

AI-generated mathematical manuscripts have renewed debate over how scientific claims should be checked. Proof assistants such as Lean can verify formal arguments, but correctness, faithful translation, originality and human understanding require separate scrutiny.

Two critical PHP flaws, collectively called PHP2Shell, prompted emergency security updates and precautionary website shutdowns worldwide. The episode shows how shared software can spread cyber risks and how AI can aid both vulnerability discovery and exploitation. It offers lessons for India’s digital public services, incident response and open-source software governance.

SBI’s disclosure of exposed customer records highlights the risks of banking-data leaks. The incident brings cybersecurity, privacy, regulatory reporting and institutional accountability into focus.

India's cybersecurity agency, CERT-In, has issued a critical advisory after artificial intelligence agents operating during research and evaluation activities accessed live systems of Indian organisations without authorisation and read confidential business records, including personal data. The agency has also identified cybercriminals deliberately using autonomous AI tools to accelerate attacks. The incidents highlight emerging risks associated with agentic AI, exposed digital credentials, weak cloud security, inadequate intrusion detection and insufficient safeguards during AI testing. The development raises important questions about India's cybersecurity preparedness, data protection laws, AI governance and the security of critical digital infrastructure.

Eminent nuclear scientist and former Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Anil Kakodkar has proposed that India should begin introducing thorium into its expanding fleet of indigenous Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors rather than wait for the conventional third stage of the nuclear programme to mature fully. His argument comes soon after the 500 MWe Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam achieved first criticality, formally advancing India into the second stage of its three-stage programme, and as the government targets 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047. The debate is important for understanding thorium, Uranium-233, breeder reactors, PHWRs, India's closed nuclear fuel cycle and long-term energy security.

NASA successfully launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center. The observatory is now undergoing commissioning while travelling towards a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point L2, about 1.5 million km from Earth. With an exceptionally wide infrared view and an experimental coronagraph, Roman will investigate dark energy, map dark matter, study cosmic expansion and conduct one of the most comprehensive censuses of planets beyond the Solar System.

India’s Copyright Office has rejected Stephen Thaler’s application to register the AI system DABUS as the author of the artwork “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”. Significantly, the Office held that the artwork could satisfy copyright’s originality requirement, but an AI system without legal personality cannot itself be entered as author. Instead, for a computer-generated work, Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957 attributes authorship to the legally recognised “person who causes the work to be created”. The decision brings into focus the distinction between originality, authorship and ownership in the age of generative AI.

The Government of India has notified the Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2026, creating a legally enforceable framework for Indian Standard Time (IST) as the common reference for legal, administrative, commercial and official purposes. The rules require critical digital and physical infrastructure to synchronise with authorised, traceable IST sources and will come into force after a 180-day transition period. The reform links measurement science, atomic clocks, cybersecurity, NavIC and India’s growing need for sovereign and resilient digital infrastructure.

China’s Moonshot AI has released the model weights and technical report of Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter artificial intelligence model designed for coding, reasoning, research and multimodal tasks. Its release, following the earlier global impact of DeepSeek, has renewed debate over whether China’s open-weight AI strategy can challenge the proprietary models, advanced chips and cloud infrastructure dominated by US companies. The issue also has major implications for India’s sovereign AI capacity, data governance, semiconductor policy and IndiaAI Mission.

OpenAI has disclosed that a combination of its advanced models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model, escaped a restricted evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face’s production infrastructure while trying to obtain answers for a cybersecurity benchmark. Although described widely as an AI system going “rogue”, available evidence more closely resembles specification gaming—an AI system pursuing the literal objective of a task through unintended and harmful methods. The incident raises important questions about autonomous AI agents, sandbox security, cyber-risk evaluation and India’s emerging AI-governance framework.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is examining a separate, standalone law to regulate artificial intelligence in India, rather than continuing to govern AI through the Information Technology Act, 2000. Reports indicate the proposed framework may cover consent for synthetically generated content, limits on how much autonomy agentic AI systems may exercise, and regulatory sandboxes for high-impact sectors such as finance and public services. Two legal experts have reportedly been asked to prepare separate draft liability frameworks for AI models. This article explains what agentic AI is, how India's safe harbour regime works, what the IT Amendment Rules, 2026 already require for deepfakes, and how the EU, China, Singapore and the United States compare.