[clock ticking]
[theme music]
CARL AZUZ: Hey, everyone.
I'm Carl Azuz, happy to see you this Tuesday.
We're starting today's show in Europe.
For the first time in 20 years, a French
President has won re-election.
That President is Emmanuel Macron.
On Sunday, he faced off against the same candidate,
Marine Le Pen, who had run against him
in the 2017 election.
President Macron's victory wasn't by as many votes
this time as it was five years ago.
On Sunday, Le Pen won 41.5% of the vote, that's
the most ever for a candidate from France's
National Rally party.
But President Macron from the Onwards Republic party
won 58.5% of the vote.
In his victory speech, he promised
he'd be a president for each and every one of the French.
But after the election, he and Le Pen
still disagreed on whether Macron could smooth out
political divisions in France.
The president said he must, Le Pen said he wouldn't.
Those divisions were clear among the protesters who opposed
President Macron, on the left side of your screen,
and the supporters who celebrated
his victory, on the right.
Many voters didn't turn out for either candidate.
The French government says the abstention
rate, the percentage of people who didn't vote at all,
was 28%.
That's its highest level in more than 50 years.
And regardless of the election's outcome,
the challenges facing France remain high.
The country has seen several political storms
since the 2017 election.
And amid rising energy prices that only got worse
after Russia invaded Ukraine, France's newly reelected leader
has a lot to deal with in the months ahead.
President Macron says he'll address all of France's
current problems and that his second term will not
be a continuation of his first.
One thing that could affect his governing ability
are France's upcoming parliamentary elections.
Those are happening in June and Le Pen
says her party is in an excellent position
to make gains in them.
- Young, bold, ambitious.
EMMANUEL MACRON THROUGH INTERPRETER:
We are at the dawn of an extraordinary renaissance.
- When Emmanuel Macron became the president of France
in 2017, he promised a fresh direction for the country,
pro-business and staunchly pro-European.
Within months, he was mired in challenges
that would dog his presidency.
The first was one of his own making.
Sparked by a tax on diesel that particularly affected poorer
rural drivers, tens of thousands of French protesters
took to the streets.
[protesters shouting]
JEROME RODRIGUES THROUGH INTERPRETER:
French people don't have the means
to buy an electric vehicle.
And if you want it, it's the straw
that broke the camel's back.
[gunshots]
- The Yellow Vest Movement became
one of the most significant French protests
in decades, although Macron eventually
rowed back on the diesel tax.
EMMANUEL MACRON THROUGH INTERPRETER:
I will not give anything to those who want destruction
and disorder because the Republic is
both public order and the free expression of opinions.
- As protests faded, the unexpected struck--
COVID-19.
"We're at war," declared Macron, shutting
down France in one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe.
DJALLALI ANNANE: So first wave, people were really angry
because of neglect and the need for full lockdown
and the number of fatal cases.
- Despite a slow rollout for European vaccines,
Macron doubled down on vaccinations
to get France out of lockdowns, mandating health policies
to push people to get jabbed.
[protesters shouting]
Protests from a vocal minority erupted
in response even as demand for vaccines
skyrocketed almost overnight.
But it's been internationally where Macron has had some
of his most important moments, all marked
by his distinctive style.
NATALIE LOISEAU: He speaks his mind,
he speaks loud, but you cannot use
the same old diplomatic words.
And he's done it quite often.
It's blunt, it's disruptive, but then people listen.
CARL AZUZ: Ten-second trivia.
Which of these Greek scientists would have
had the earliest laboratory?
Pythagoras, Archimedes, Plato, or Aristotle?
[clock ticking]
Pythagoras was born the longest time ago in 570 BC
and might have had the first laboratory ever recorded.
Up next, a new way to conduct medical research using
virtual reality technology.
That in itself is a new concept.
The practice of research in laboratories directly
interacting with whatever matter you're studying
goes back millennia, but with new tools come new ideas.
And a company named Nanome which is featured in our next report
isn't the only one that offers VR software
for scientific research.
There are some potential drawbacks to this.
For one thing, virtual reality has
long been criticized for causing motion sickness in some users.
Some of the technology is still experimental.
It's not as refined as tried and true traditional research.
It's not known yet if the insight it offers
is worth the investment.
You've got to buy the headsets, the computers, the software.
And Nanome itself might not be as user-friendly in some ways
as its competitors.
But it is one way in which scientists
and medical companies can get an immersive view of the molecules
they're studying.
[music playing]
- Oh, OK.
Well, let's give me some hair.
This might look like a game but I'm exploring a virtual reality
platform that helps scientists design
real medicines by putting them inside the molecules
they study.
I mean, this is crazy.
I'm like in the molecule, looking up at it.
Joining me is Steve McCloskey, the 30-year-old
co-founded San Diego based startup Nanome in 2016
to develop the technology.
But you started off as an academic nano engineer.
So what inspired you to get into the technology space
and actually create this platform?
STEVE MCCLOSKEY: Yeah, I've always been in the game
and grew up big gamer.
I remembered how different it was to go into VR
and be in the environment compared
to just playing a 2D game.
When I was going through nano engineering, I was like,
why don't we have a better immersive
graphics way to do this?
- Turns out a lot of scientists were asking the same.
Since the platform launched in 2018, hundreds of organizations
have adopted Nanome's VR tools for their research.
McCloskey says, at a cost of $5,000-plus per year.
STEVE MCCLOSKEY: Being able to go into VR, you actually
immediately gain new insights.
So this could send you on a completely new path
of molecular development that would have otherwise
never been discovered.
- That's exactly what's needed to fight
one growing health crisis--
antibiotic resistance.
It's what happens when bacteria adapt and no longer respond
to today's antibiotics, making common infections
difficult to treat and even fatal.
LifeArc, a medical research charity based in the UK
is using Nanome's VR to search for molecules that
can fight some of these bugs.
DAVID POWELL: These bacteria are inherently
difficult to develop new drugs for because they've
got very high natural defenses.
- Tackling the problem in three dimensions
help speed up discovery, LifeArc says, but there are still
financial hurdles to overcome.
DAVID POWELL: The commercial returns for new antibiotics
are really poor.
- That's because compared to other medications,
antibiotics are cheap to buy but expensive to develop.
What kind of time savings does nano allow for,
and how does that then translate to cost savings?
STEVE MCCLOSKEY: Getting a drug to market six months quicker
might be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of value
because you're able to start selling it earlier.
This is going to be patient lives that you're saving,
improvements in their lives.
- Even with a quicker path to discovery, only around 1
in 10 new antibiotics make it past clinical trial.
And no antibiotic designed with Nanome's platform
is at that stage yet.
But McCloskey says the VR gives more scientists
a chance to beat the odds.
STEVE MCCLOSKEY: It's actually a free version.
We try to make it as accessible as possible,
really democratizing access to scientific tools like this
and trying to see a billion scientists in the world.
CARL AZUZ: Teachers, parents, homeschoolers, instructors,
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[music playing]
Well, here's a world record attempt
you don't hear about every day.
This is Whitby Abbey in the United Kingdom.
Its ruins date back as early as the 600s.
But more recently in 1890, the author Bram Stoker
visited the site and he wrote it into his famous novel, Dracula.
That book came out 125 years ago,
so to commemorate that there's going
to be live music, food, and drinks,
and free entry to people styled like Dracula.
The goal?
To break the record for the most people
dressed as vampires in one place.
That record is 1,039.
But who's counting?
Ha, ha, ha.
I was just going to end the show there, but then I thought,
I could vamp a bit.
This could be an interesting caper to tell the tooth.
Some people are really stoked about it.
They're certainly going to bat an eye.
And so I decided to sink my teeth
more puns because I thought of them in the nick of time.
I'm Carl Azuz.
We are going to shout out Seaford High School today.
It is in Seaford, Delaware.
Thank you for your request at youtube.com/CNN.