1912, New York and Bologna • Cambridge / Reisner, Joule, May 2026: a solar photoreactor turns spent car-battery acid and plastic waste into clean hydrogen and acetic acid, running 260 hours without loss on a three-component carbon-nitride catalyst.
New York, September 1912. Cambridge, May 2026. An Italian chemist's vivid prediction of a solar-fuel industry, and the Cambridge laboratory that just built the catalyst.
•4 min read
1971, Islamabad, Beijing, Washington, New Delhi, the Bay of Bengal and Dhaka • Bloomberg, 8 May 2026: One year after the May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, Trump's warm Pakistan ties (the WLFI crypto MoU; White House reception of Field Marshal Asim Munir) are giving Islamabad diplomatic cover and worrying New Delhi.
In 1971, Richard Nixon used Pakistan as the back channel to Beijing and sent the USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India. India responded by signing a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union and dismembering Pakistan in two weeks. Fifty-five years later, Donald Trump's Pakistan tilt is making New Delhi uneasy.
•6 min read
1768 to 1864, Pavia and Paris • Currie / Brown / Poss, PNAS, mid-April 2026: SP6 and SP8 transcription factors are conserved switches in the regenerating epidermis of axolotls, zebrafish and mice; gene-therapy activation partially restores digit regeneration in adult mice.
Pavia, October 1768. Wake Forest, April 2026. Two hundred and fifty-eight years between an Italian priest's question and the first molecular ingredient of an answer.
•5 min read
9th century BC to 1939, Olympia, Berlin and the Polish border • Red Square, 9 May 2026: Putin presides over his smallest Victory Day parade in 26 years (no military hardware, 5 foreign leaders), made possible by a Trump-brokered 9-11 May ceasefire with 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner exchange.
Hitler invoked an ancient Greek convention in 1936 so the world's leaders could comfortably attend his Olympics. Three years later he invaded Poland. Ninety years later, Putin needed a three-day ceasefire to hold his Victory Day parade.
•5 min read
1971 to 1977, Camp David, Manhattan, Tokyo, Rome, Washington • Court of International Trade, 7 May 2026: 2-1 ruling against Trump's second 10 percent global tariff, imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The administration is preparing to refund 166 billion dollars plus interest.
A Japanese zipper company sued over a 10 percent global tariff in 1971. The warning the 1975 court left behind is what just struck down Donald Trump's tariffs, twice.
•6 min read
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
1871-1923, Berlin and Vienna • China holds $3.43 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves (February 2026) and ran a record $1.2 trillion 2025 trade surplus, into a financial system that has already produced the post-Evergrande property crisis.
Berlin, May 1873. Beijing, May 2026. The same problem, on a much larger scale: what happens to a country that absorbs more money, faster, than it can possibly digest?
•6 min read
March 1930, Berlin • Romania's parliament topples Bolojan's pro-EU coalition 281-4 (5 May 2026) after the Social Democrats walk out over austerity, opening a path for the far-right AUR.
Berlin, March 1930. Bucharest, May 2026. The same vote, twice.
•6 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.