1962 to 1983, Cambridge and Yorktown Heights • Q-CTRL / IBM, 6 May 2026: 3,000-fold speedup on a Fermi-Hubbard simulation using a 120-qubit IBM superconducting quantum processor (Josephson-junction transmon qubits at 15 millikelvin). First practical quantum advantage on an industrial problem.
Yorktown Heights, 1980. Yorktown Heights, May 2026. The same lab, the same architecture, the same temperature, answering a different question forty-three years later.
•5 min read
1948 to 1983, Cold Spring Harbor and Stockholm • TransCODE Consortium, Nature, 7 May 2026: 1,785 newly catalogued short proteins (peptideins) from non-canonical open reading frames expand the known human proteome by approximately 10 per cent.
Cold Spring Harbor, 1948. Heidelberg, May 2026. A maize geneticist who waited thirty years for vindication, and a consortium that just expanded the human proteome by ten per cent.
•4 min read
1944 to 1971, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Stanford and Oslo • Van Vuuren et al, Geoscientific Model Development, 7 April 2026: the architects of the SSP framework formally retire RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 as 'implausible' from the CMIP7 framework that will inform IPCC AR7.
Stanford, May 1968. Utrecht, April 2026. Two retired worst cases, fifty-eight years apart. Both written off by a footnote, not a press conference.
•5 min read
1764 to 1891, Naples, Paris, Kiel, Wiesbaden • Penn State (Drew lab, lead author Garborg, Nature Neuroscience, 27 April 2026): the abdomen pumps the brain via the vertebral venous plexus, gel-forming pressure at every step.
Kiel, 1888. Penn State, 2026. Heinrich Quincke spent his career asking what made cerebrospinal fluid move. The answer was waiting in the same place his needle had pointed.
•5 min read
1940 to 1944, Boston, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, Normandy • McGill click-clotting (Jiang et al, Nature, 29 April 2026): bio-orthogonal crosslinking of red blood cells gels in 5 seconds, 13× tougher and 4× more adhesive than a native clot.
Pearl Harbor, 1941. Montreal, 2026. Eighty-two years of telling blood when to clot, and the answer keeps getting better.
•6 min read
1827 to 1900, Berlin, Paris, Oberlin Ohio, and Pittsburgh • Cyclotrialumane: the first stable Al(I) trimer, demonstrated in April 2026 to perform two reactions until now reserved for platinum and palladium.
Paris, 1855. King's College London, 2026. The metal Napoleon III gave to his most honoured guests has just walked into the column of the periodic table that runs catalysis.
•6 min read
1971-2024 Tokyo, Akita, Kyoto, Bronx, Paris, Dallas • Polypurine reverse Hoogsteen hairpin DNA molecules silence PCSK9 in cells and mice (Biochemical Pharmacology, May 2026 press wave).
A Barcelona-Oregon team has designed a synthetic DNA molecule that silences the gene driving heart disease. Fifty-three years ago, in a Tokyo basement laboratory, a Japanese biochemist found something that did the same thing in a sample of rice from a Kyoto grain shop.
•7 min read
1935 Princeton → 1964 Belfast/CERN → 1982 Orsay → 1997 Innsbruck • First quantum teleportation between dissimilar quantum dots over a 270m open-air link between two Sapienza buildings (Nature Communications, late April 2026).
This week, in two buildings of Sapienza University in Rome connected by 270 metres of open Roman air, physicists teleported the state of a single photon between two unmatched quantum dots. Einstein, who is the reason this is possible at all, would have hated every word of that sentence.
•7 min read
1882-1908 Sicily and Paris • First 3D images of cytotoxic T cells killing cancer cells at the immunological synapse, by cryo-expansion microscopy (Cell Reports, 29 April 2026).
A research team in Switzerland just produced the first 3D images of immune cells killing cancer cells. The cells were doing something a Russian zoologist guessed at in 1882, alone in a Sicilian house, while his family was at the circus.
•5 min read
1229 CE Jerusalem to 2005 Stanford • A synchrotron at the Canadian Light Source has just read the cardiovascular blueprint of a healing T. rex's broken rib using the same iron-fluorescence trick that recovered Archimedes in 2005.
In 1229 a monk in Jerusalem scraped Archimedes off a parchment to make a prayer book. In 2005 a particle accelerator at Stanford read what he had erased. In 2026 the same machine read 66-million-year-old blood vessels inside a T. rex's broken rib.