Some time after March 2020’s stay-at-home order, I began reading excerpts from Samuel Pepys’ diary. In one of them, he strolls for the first time past a household infected by the great plague. A red cross is daubed on the door, next to the chilling words “Lord have mercy upon us”. Comforting lockdown reading this was not. But I was grateful for the historical record Pepys left behind, which helped make some sense of the unfolding pandemic.

Perhaps there’s a modern-day Pepys scribbling away in some London backwater. But today’s pandemic has taken place in a connected world, one in which writing and publishing have been democratised by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. So where better to search for an account of the COVID-19 crisis than in an archive of over 84 million pandemic-related tweets? One of the linguistics experts behind this archive has shared his hopes for what looks set to be a key historical document that’ll help future generations understand our strange times.

Somewhere in the archive, you’ll find Twitter users calling for a rethink on how, where and when we work. We’ve heard from an economics professor who believes that, post-pandemic, we’ll have the perfect opportunity to move to a four-day week. And promising new research has yielded a novel way to recycle electric vehicle batteries, using bacteria to “bioleach” in-demand precious metals from electrical waste.

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