Stephen Buranyi is an editor at the Guardian.
The obvious utility for metal-organic frameworks – always a concern for the Nobel committee, especially in chemistry, especially in recent years – is to use their vast surface to capture and store other molecules: water or carbon in the air; pollutants in the environment; drugs or toxins in the body. There are startups and clinical trials exploring these uses, but nothing yet at scale. That said, they are unquestionably fascinating materials.
The mad cow disease crisis began in 1984, with reports of cows ‘acting strangely’ on a farm in Sussex, and ended 32 years later, with the last reported death from a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It was clear early on that something in the brain matter of cows was causing the infection, and that its vector was the charnel houses in which the brains and spines of...
In February 2003, Sars – the first Sars – hit Toronto, carried back from Hong Kong by an elderly woman who’d been to a wedding. The outbreak was the largest and deadliest outside Asia, with 241 infections and 41 deaths over the next few months. A team at St John’s Rehab Hospital followed up with fifty patients reporting post-Sars symptoms. John Patcai, the hospital’s chief of staff, has made the comparison between long Sars and long Covid. The window he offers is small and narrow: as interest in Sars dwindled so did funding, and after a few years the group stopped their battery of physiological tests, continuing to record only the patients’ psychological state and self-reported complaints.
Viktor Orbán is the longest serving elected leader in Europe. Thanks to his victory in April’s parliamentary election, the Hungarian prime minister will soon surpass Angela Merkel’s record as the longest ruling European leader of the 21st century. Achieving this on a nationalist platform explicitly opposed to international liberal values has made him a hero to the worldwide nativist right: Nigel Farage once called him ‘the future of Europe’; Donald Trump twice endorsed his latest election campaign; and last month CPAC, a US-based political conference central to the Trump movement, held a European version of their event in Budapest with the former president appearing via video link.
A small crowd gathered on Saturday outside the Ministry of Defence in Westminster, just across from Downing Street, for the second iteration of the March for Science. Last year’s event, which nucleated around the specific threat posed to American scientists by the incoming Trump administration, drew tens of thousands of people to Washington DC, and more than a million more across 200 cities worldwide. The number in London was reported to be 10,000. This year there were fewer than a hundred.
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