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Articles by Khalid Saqr
A transverse picoNewton force revealed in anisotropic Womersley flow
Abstract The fluid-dynamic quantity that regulates endothelial mechanotransduction remains unsettled. Wall Shear Stress (WSS) characterizes boundary traction but does not represent the volumetric inertial structure of arterial blood flow. Meanwhile, blood exhibits direction-dependent stress under physiological shear, suggesting that the classical Womersley solution of the Navier-Stokes equation may omit constitutive mechanisms relevant to near-wall dynamics.
Dissecting AI-related Paper Retraction Across Countries and Institutions
This version is not peer-reviewed. Submitted: 02 January 2026 You are already at the latest version Research integrity is currently besieged by a surge in synthetic manuscripts. A forensic workflow is operationalized herein to isolate and quantify ``computer-aided'' misconduct within the global scholarly record. A corpus of \( N=3,974 \) retracted DOIs sourced from the Retraction Watch Database was analyzed, with records cross-linked to institutional metadata via the OpenAlex API.
Guest Post — Building an Intelligence Infrastructure for Science - The Scholarly Kitchen
Editor’s note: Today’s guest post is by Khalid Saqr and Gareth Dyke of the Thomas Kuhn Foundation. Khalid is a fluid dynamicist, academic, and deep-tech expert. Gareth is an accomplished researcher, author, and journal manager with over 380 peer-reviewed publications. In every generation, progress depends on one simple but radical idea: That we can understand ourselves better and act on that understanding. Nations have done it through democracy. Economies have done it through statistics.
What Happens When AI Writes Your Favorite Film and TV Show?
The first feature films written by AI have already premiered. You didn't hear wrong. The credits no longer belong to people, and the audience still cried, laughed, and clapped as if nothing had changed. "The public has a right to know when they're watching something written by a human being." - Oscar-nominated screenwriter Billy Ray, speaking on AI's role in Hollywood In late 2023, The Diary of Sisyphus debuted at Italy's Festival dello Spettatore. Its screenplay was generated entirely by GPT-NEO.
In Theory We Trust
If you look across human history, you'll find a consistent sequence. First comes theory, then comes technology. Theoretical struggle has always been the defining force of progress. The steam engine didn't change the world until the laws of thermodynamics explained how heat moves. The transistor - the seed of the Digital Age - was not a lucky accident of wiring; it came straight out of quantum mechanics.
The Five Years That Decide Everything
The Five Years That Decide Everything In finance, speed has always been money. By 2030, the capacity to model entire global markets in real time — integrating decades of tick-level data, economic indicators, and satellite imagery — will no longer belong only to the world’s most sophisticated trading desks. It will sit on the workstations of mid-sized firms, university labs, and even individual traders. That is the economic fact at the heart of the Civilizational Shift Period from 2025 to 2030.
Compute is Destiny: Inside the AGI Race
In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023), every nation scrambles for two palm-sized keys that control “the Entity,” a rogue AI. Swap those cinematic keys for ASML’s lone extreme-ultraviolet lithography laser, add TSMC’s 3 nm fabs and NVIDIA’s H100 boards, and the thriller stops being fiction: three choke-points now decide which country can build god-level intelligence—and who gets locked out of the future. In geopolitics, choke-points are destiny.
On Thinking Machines and How to Think with Them!
On Thinking Machines and How to Think with Them! Analysts at Morgan Stanley used a GPT-4-based model to interpret subtle shifts in central bank language, earnings calls, and market sentiment. The model inferred an upcoming monetary pivot weeks before public confirmation—a feat that emerged not from numerical data but from reasoning across textual cues. These models aren’t merely fluent in playing with language. They appear to engage in a form of reasoning.
TRL-5 and Other Dangerous Places
How Most Investors Miss the Moment Between Breakthrough and Belief In 2011, a startup in Cambridge claimed they could turn sunlight into fuel. No wires. No panels. Just a glass of water, a cheap catalyst, and a bit of alchemy. They called it the “artificial leaf.” The science worked. MIT cheered. The media nodded. Investors hesitated. “Too early,” they said. But what does “early” mean? A few months later, the same investors poured millions into a dating app built in a weekend.
Foresight Is No Longer an Institutional Superpower
Why a $700 laptop and a deep reasoning model end Wall Street’s foresight monopoly. Last week in Riyadh, a 27-year-old analyst fed U.S.-China trade war updates into her computer. Within minutes, her simulation flagged a likely $9 spike in Brent crude—driven by redirected Chinese demand, a Gulf tanker bottleneck, and sliding refinery margins in South Korea. She didn’t work for Aramco or the PIF. She wasn’t part of the energy ministry.
Egypt Could Tokenize Its Way Out of Debt in Three Years - But Won’t
Egypt’s external debt climbed above US $155 billion in the third quarter of 2024, nearly trebling in eight years and approaching 40 per cent of GDP. At the same time, Suez Canal receipts have sagged under Red Sea security disruptions, and a record tourism haul of US $13.6 billion in FY 2022/23 now looks fragile. Cairo’s room to refinance is narrowing fast. Were policy-makers willing, Web3 could refinance the country in under three years.
Scaling Emptiness
Why MENA Investors Are Funding Startups the Wrong Way In the past decade, the MENA region has witnessed an explosion of entrepreneurial energy. Record venture capital funding, a boom in startup incubators, and countless press releases celebrating "success stories." Yet for all this activity, the region has produced few globally recognized technology giants — none rivalling Amazon, Google, or even emerging Indian powerhouses like Flipkart and BYJU’S.
China’s Arctic Ambitions in Greenland
Resource Security or Strategic Entrapment? Khalid Saqr · Follow 3 min read · -- China’s 2018 Arctic Policy, which declares the region as a “community of common destiny,” frames its engagement with Greenland as a win-win partnership. Yet under the rhetoric of “sustainable development” and “scientific cooperation,” Beijing’s actions reveal a calculated strategy to exploit Greenland’s resources and geographic position for long-term geopolitical advantage.
Repurposing AI for the Information Warfare
The Trump administration has just weaponized AI. What are the consequences? Khalid Saqr · Follow 5 min read · -- Some of the most consequential decisions in history do not arrive with grand pronouncements or sweeping declarations. Instead, they slip through the cracks, buried in bureaucratic language, reshaping reality before anyone has fully noticed.
Narratives of Divide: The Polarizing Power of Large Language Models in a Turbulent World
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Science in the Crossfire
On Discovery, Trust, and the Systems That Shape Progress Khalid Saqr · Follow 3 min read · -- Science doesn’t just happen. It’s built — a slow, deliberate process that transforms curiosity into discovery and answers into action. But its influence doesn’t stop in the lab or the pages of academic journals.
Towards Trustless Science
How scientists are using the Polygon blockchain in the third digital revolution Khalid Saqr · Follow 5 min read · -- As we stand on the precipice of the third digital revolution, the infrastructure of our world is shifting beneath our feet. At the core of this shift there is a new fabric weaving through multiple industries, from healthcare to legal systems, from energy grids to e-commerce: the Polygon blockchain.
The Partisan Divide - How Politics Shapes Scientific Trust in the US
White adults’ strong trust in medical scientists fell from 43% to 29% in just one year Khalid Saqr · Follow 4 min read · -- Trust in science isn’t just an abstract virtue; it’s the backbone of public health, technological advancement, and societal resilience. But today, that trust is under siege in ways that feel unprecedented.
How many AI investors know about the Efficient Compute Frontier?
And does validation loss really matter? Khalid Saqr · Follow 4 min read · -- The global race to dominate the artificial intelligence (AI) technology is no longer just about who can create the largest, most complex models. Increasingly, it’s about doing more with less—finding efficiencies in the vast computational demands of AI systems while keeping an eye on what truly matters: solving real-world problems and capitalizing on the returns of solving them.
Every step you take!
How the Presence Protocol defines the future of SocialFi Khalid Saqr · Follow 4 min read · -- There’s a curious paradox about human nature. On one hand, we are creatures of habit, tethered to routines and familiar spaces. On the other hand, we are innate explorers, driven by a desire to venture beyond the known, to seek out the new and unfamiliar.
The Woman in the Red Dress
The Woman in the Red Dress In the Matrix, the Woman in the Red Dress is designed to grab your attention, pulling focus away from the important reality unfolding around you. It’s a symbol of distraction — something that looks enticing but hides the truth. Similarly, startups today can create their own “Lady in the Red Dress” using digital marketing. With well-placed ads, social media hype, and data-driven targeting, they can show impressive growth metrics that seduce investors.
Einsteins make terrible Edisons!
Why scientists fail at startups and how to fix that Imagine if we had computers in the 1850s, would we be living in 2024 now or in 2100?! Well, the only possibility we could have had it was because of Ada Lovelace. The only legitimate child of Lord Byron was a brilliant mathematician who recognized the potential for computers long before the technology existed.
The multibillion dollar costs of irreproducible research
Irreproducible research are not simply an impediment to scientific progress — they carry sobering economic and human costs measured in billions wasted and lives endangered. Nowhere are these impacts more devastating than in biomedical research, where faulty preclinical studies misdirect resources and misguide medical decisions. Reforms restoring reliability to medicine are urgently needed to avoid spiraling expenses and protect the life of millions of patients worldwide.
R2-D2 is here, and it’s yours!
R2-D2 is here, and it’s yours! Imagine R2-D2, not just as the beeping, whirring sidekick, but as a revolutionary research assistant ready to reshape the very core of your research group. No longer confined to beeping cryptic droid pronouncements, picture him as a fluent polyglot, effortlessly traversing the vast linguistic landscapes of scientific papers, revealing hidden connections, and highlighting overlooked patterns.
Have you met Dr. ChatGPT?!
The emergence of advanced AI systems like ChatGPT that can generate human-like text has sparked much debate around the future value of graduate degrees and advanced education in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). As machine learning models demonstrate new abilities, academics are left to contemplate what this rapid technological progress means for the economic need of human expertise.
The Heavy Emotional Toll of Our Digital Lives
In today's digitally-driven world, we are constantly bombarded with a ceaseless influx of content vying for our attention. From the ping of a new text to the scroll of an endless newsfeed, our devices provide a portal to a vast expanse of information at our fingertips. However, not all this content is benign; the onslaught of emotionally-charged stimuli has very real effects on our psychological well-being.
No More Apologies!
"I don't say, oh, excuse me, but I have to eat, or excuse me, but I need to fulfill my sexual urges, my biological impulses. I say, Hooray! I identify myself with my drives. They're me, and I don't take a passive attitude towards them and apologize for them." In this profound quote, Alan Watts challenges our common tendency to view ourselves as passive beings controlled by drives and impulses. We regularly feel compelled to justify behaviors tied to fundamental needs like eating or sex.
A singularity in the making
My 12 years old son asked me this morning about ChatGPT and if it will spare future kids from schools. As we went on in an interesting conversation, I realized that we are equally confused about intelligent machines, despite the 30 years gap between us. I was 16, back in 1998, when I first used the internet on a 486 Compaq, and the very simple idea that I could access computers anywhere in the world was mind blowing.
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