June 1887 to June 1890, the German Empire under Bismarck and the early reign of Wilhelm II • Beijing, May 2026: Xi receives Trump (13-15 May) and Putin (19-20 May) at the Great Hall within a week. Energy and security joint statements with Russia; no treaty with the US; 'China holds the cards' framing.
Berlin, 18 June 1887: the German chancellor signed a secret three-year treaty with Russia at the same time he was bound by a public treaty against Russia. The arrangement held the European peace for three more years. Then his emperor died. Trump and Putin visited Beijing within a week of each other this month.
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1900 to 1930, the Institute of Pathological Anatomy in Vienna, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm • A May 2026 Nature Nanotechnology paper by Möckl and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen introduces Glycan Atlasing, a technique that combines DNA-tagged lectins, metabolic oligosaccharide engineering and super-resolution microscopy to map every glycan on the surface of a cell at nanometre resolution; the technique distinguishes cancerous from healthy tissue and tracks immune-cell activation by the spatial pattern of sugars alone.
Vienna, 1900: a thirty-two-year-old physician named Karl Landsteiner pricked the fingers of his lab colleagues, mixed every serum with every set of red blood cells, and discovered that the chemistry the immune system was reading was sugar chemistry on the surfaces of cells. He had found the ABO blood groups. This month, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light has published the first nanometre-scale atlas of the entire sugar code on every kind of human cell.
•5 min read
August 1974 to December 2021, the Republic of Korea • Peru's 7 June 2026 presidential runoff: Keiko Fujimori (Fuerza Popular, 17.19%) versus leftist Roberto Sánchez (Juntos por el Perú, 12.03%). It is Keiko's fourth consecutive runoff, eight months after the death of her father Alberto Fujimori.
Seoul, 15 August 1974: a 22-year-old woman watched her mother die at the National Theatre. Two presidencies, an assassination, an impeachment and a prison sentence later, the same arc is being walked in Peru. Keiko Fujimori is in her fourth presidential runoff on 7 June.
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1781 to 1822, Bath, Datchet, and Slough in late-Georgian England • On 6 May 2026 the JWST COSMOS-Web collaboration published in The Astrophysical Journal the largest and highest-resolution map ever made of the cosmic web of dark-matter filaments, based on a quarter of a million galaxies in a 0.54-square-degree patch of sky reaching back to less than a billion years after the Big Bang; the same week, the European Southern Observatory's VLT released the first sharp direct image ever taken of a single cosmic filament (a 3-million-light-year strand of intergalactic gas connecting two quasars).
Bath, 13 March 1781: a German-born church organist named William Herschel accidentally discovered Uranus through a home-made seven-foot telescope in his back garden. Four years later he and his sister Caroline read a paper to the Royal Society arguing that the Milky Way was a disc-shaped system of stars, the first attempt in human history to map cosmic structure. In May 2026 the James Webb Space Telescope just published the clearest map of the cosmic web ever made.
•5 min read
September 1980, the Iran-Iraq War, Tuwaitha • 17 May 2026 drone strike on the UAE's Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant: three drones, two intercepted, one hit a perimeter substation generator. No claim of responsibility. UAE adviser pointed at Iran's proxy network.
At dawn on 30 September 1980, four Iranian F-4 Phantoms refuelled in the air over the border, climbed deliberately high, then dropped to the deck and bombed Iraq's Osirak reactor. It was the first attack on a nuclear plant in human history. Forty-six years later something flew at the UAE's Barakah.
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1815 to 1816, Sumbawa Island, Lake Geneva, and the northern hemisphere • A May 2026 Nature Communications paper by van Herpen, Johnson et al. (Acacia Impact Innovation Lab + University of Copenhagen) shows that the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai underwater eruption injected seawater into the stratosphere that combined with volcanic ash and ultraviolet light to generate reactive chlorine, oxidising atmospheric methane at 900 ± 220 tonnes per day. The atmosphere did something none of the contemporary models had predicted: a complex-system surprise on the opposite side of the ledger from Tambora.
In April 1815, the volcano of Tambora in Indonesia produced the largest eruption in recorded human history; the summer that followed killed harvests across two hemispheres and produced Frankenstein at Lake Geneva. In May 2026, atmospheric chemists at Copenhagen and the Acacia lab have shown that the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption scrubbed 900 tonnes of methane a day from the upper atmosphere by a chemistry no model had predicted. The atmosphere is still surprising the chemists.
•6 min read
1890 to 1953, New York Hospital, Memorial Hospital, and the Cancer Research Institute • At AACR 2026 in San Diego, the British NEOPRISM-CRC trial (led by Dr Kai-Keen Shiu of UCL) reports that all 32 patients given pre-surgical pembrolizumab for stage 2/3 dMMR/MSI-high bowel cancer remain alive and relapse-free at 33 months of follow-up. The principle that Coley reached for in 1891 (pre-surgical immune activation) is now standard immunotherapy.
New York Hospital, 3 May 1891: a young bone surgeon called William Coley rubbed Streptococcus pyogenes into the tumour of an Italian immigrant called Zola. Zola got a fever; his cancer disappeared. A hundred and thirty-five years later, thirty-two British bowel cancer patients given a short course of pre-surgical immunotherapy have just hit thirty-three months without a single relapse.
•5 min read
October 1986, Reykjavík, Iceland • The Trump-Xi Beijing state summit (13-15 May 2026): no treaty signed, a walk to the Temple of Heaven, and parallel actions including Yuan Hua Hu's Hormuz transit, the cancelled Polish deployment, the Havana visit, and Kinmen tourism resumption.
Reykjavík, 12 October 1986: Reagan and Gorbachev nearly abolished all nuclear weapons and signed nothing. The press called it a disaster. Within five years the Cold War was over. In Beijing this month, Trump and Xi did the same.
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1868 to 1895, the Madras Presidency, London, and Uppsala • Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and University of Ottawa physicists, led by Hanieh Fattahi and Robert W. Boyd, generate polarisation-entangled photon pairs directly from sunlight using spontaneous parametric down-conversion through a lithium niobate crystal, with Bell-state fidelity ~94% and Bell inequality S=2.54, while a separate Xiamen University group performs quantum ghost imaging with sunlight in Advanced Photonics.
Guntur, 18 August 1868: during a total solar eclipse, Pierre Janssen saw a yellow line in the Sun's spectrum at 587.49 nanometres that matched no known element. It took twenty-seven years to find helium on Earth. This month, physicists in Erlangen and Ottawa used ordinary sunlight to make quantum-entangled photons without a laser.
•5 min read
1853-1870 Second French Empire, Paris • The Lagos waterfront clearances in Makoko and other lagoon communities (Dec 2025-May 2026): 10,000+ displaced, 3,000+ homes destroyed, 12 dead from tear gas including two infants, for luxury 'Dubai of Africa' development.
Paris, 29 June 1853: Napoleon III handed a prefect a map and told him to air the city, unite it, beautify it. Three hundred and fifty thousand poor Parisians were pushed out of the centre. Lagos is doing the same thing this week.