1961 to 1985, Tirana and Beijing • Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te returns from his first overseas trip to Eswatini (5 May 2026), Taiwan's last African ally, escorted home by F-16Vs aboard King Mswati III's Airbus, a former China Airlines aircraft.
Tirana, October 1971. Mbabane, May 2026. The smallest ally casts the longest shadow, until its patron decides otherwise.
•8 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
April to September 1971, London and Moscow • Austria expels three Russian diplomats on 4 May 2026 over a rooftop 'antenna forest' at Russian diplomatic properties in Vienna, repeating Operation FOOT's structural play at much smaller scale.
London, August 1971. Vienna, May 2026. A drunk KGB officer in handcuffs and an antenna forest on a roof. Two host countries, fifty-five years apart, finally saying enough.
•7 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
May 1801 to June 1805, Tripoli and the Mediterranean • Trump's 'Project Freedom' (announced 3 May 2026, beginning 4 May) sends the US Navy to escort foreign vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, repeating Jefferson's 1801 convoy gambit.
Tripoli, May 1801. The Strait of Hormuz, May 2026. The same convoy operation, the same word: humanitarian.
•7 min read
December 1917 to March 1918, Brest-Litovsk and Petrograd • Iran's 14-point counter-proposal to the US ceasefire offer (2 May 2026) attempts the maximalist diplomatic gambit Trotsky tried at Brest-Litovsk in February 1918.
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
November 1956 to January 1957, London and Washington • US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth orders 5,000 US troops out of Germany after Chancellor Friedrich Merz criticises US strategy in the Iran war.
London, November 1956. Berlin, May 2026. The same lever, in two languages.
•6 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.