ON THE RECORD

RESTAURANT AND STADIUM RESTRICTIONS LIFTED AT THE END OF MAY

Restaurants and hotels were allowed to open across Hungary on the last week-end of May. “This means, people can consume food and drink inside restaurants and hotels can reopen,” an official said. Outdoor sporting and cultural events can also be held, and outdoor exhibitions in national parks can be visited bearing in mind that the safety distance must be kept everywhere. Authorities also drew attention to the fact that it is still forbidden to take part in or organize music or dance events in indoor venues. Restaurants, cafes, bakeries and buffets are now allowed to serve food and drinks indoors in Budapest as well as in the countryside after they were forced to close due to the novel coronavirus epidemic. The same rules apply to catering establishments operated by hotels. Employees are expected to wear face masks and the same physical distancing rules apply as they do outside Budapest.

PRESTIGIOUS AWARD FOR HUNGARIAN RESEARCHER

MILESTONE IN ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION AT PAKS

During the period since the start of production in 1982 until May 19, 2020, the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, located at the River Danube south of Budapest, generated a total of 500 terawatt hours, or more than 500 billion kilowatt hours, of electricity. Such an amount of electricity would be able to supply the entire world with electricity for a full week. By comparison, this much electricity would be enough for Hungary for about 12 years, an average household would consume this amount of electricity in 230 million years, and it would be enough to charge electric cars for a distance of about 260 million kilometers. According to a press release by the plant, the nuclear power station has been providing electricity at a low cost and free of greenhouse gas emissions, typically accounting for almost half of the gross domestic electricity production in recent years. The four units of the facility produced the largest amount in its history in 2019, after a continuous record of safety and production indicators in recent years, with a total of more than 16 billion kWh of electricity. As a result of regular safety improvements, the nuclear power plant is being expanded with state-of-the-art technological solutions, and accordingly, it performs among the best power plants in the world in terms of safety.

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Hungarian physicist János Frigyes Nemes has won the CMS Experiment Award of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the CMS Success Award. CMS is one of the major international experiments of the Geneva-based CERN, the accelerator of the LHC of the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The award was established by the CMS Experiment in 2007 to recognize individual accomplishments, and can be won by members of the experiment who have contributed significant and lasting individual results to the success of the experiment, according to a Wigner Physics Research Center statement to the Hungarian news agency MTI. As they write, the prestige of the award is also reflected in the fact that almost 5,500 of the approximately 15,000 people working at CERN are members of the CMS experiment and only 28 of them have received similar recognition for their achievements in 2019. According to the judges, János Frigyes Nemes won the 2019 CMS Performance Award for his innovative, original and careful determination of the LHC optics from the PPS data, a key ingredient for all analyses based on PPS information. János Frigyes Nemes is a research assistant at the Femtoscopy Research Group at the Particle and Nuclear Physics Research Institute of the Wigner Physics Research Center. He obtained his PhD in 2015 from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). He is a Hungarian member of the CERN LHC accelerator CMS and TOTEM experiments.

HUNGARIAN, THE MOST DIFFICULT LANGUAGE FOR ENGLISH SPEAKERS

Hungarian is the most difficult language for a native English speaker among languages using the same (that is, Latin) alphabet. That is the gist of an article published on the website of CNN and picked up by the Hungarian news site index.hu. "If you like a challenge, try Hungarian. It's like no other European language you've heard, except maybe Basque," the author says. Based on a comparison contained in the article, a native English speaker needs about 600 hours to learn Dutch, Norwegian, or the best-known Latin languages (Italian, Spanish, French). German is a somewhat harder nut to crack (750 hours), but even exotic Malay or Swahili (900 hours) is simpler to learn than Hungarian (1,100 hours), which means it takes the same amount of time for an Englishman to learn as Greek or Russian, though these languages use non-Latin characters.

CHARITY RELAY RUN BY THE BRITISH AMBASSADOR

As a volunteer for the Hungarian Interchurch Aid, the UK Ambassador to Hungary, Iain Lindsay, is drawing attention to the fact that the epidemic makes it even more necessary to support children. For charity, he started a running relay of well-known public figures, with whom he completed a distance of 221 kilometers by Children's Day, May 31. On May 16, Iain Lindsay was supposed to begin competing at the NN Ultrabalaton relay race as a Hungarian Interchurch Aid volunteer. For the past two years, the British Ambassador led the aid organization’s 'Don't just cheer, help!' charity running team, which collected donations for the organization’s program to support disadvantaged children. Like many events that attract large crowds, NN Ultrabalaton has been postponed until the fall of 2020 by the organizers. However, as Iain Lindsay is already leaving his posting in Budapest by October, he decided that even if he misses the Balaton race this year, he will fulfill his charity commitment: he would run his part (ten kilometers) of the 221 kms on the weekend planned for the race and launch a fundraiser for the benefit of the aid organization’s 'Hold on!' program to support children in need. “Now, maybe there is an even greater need for collaboration than when we collected donations a year ago. Many families and children may find themselves in a difficult situation due to the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The Hungarian Interchurch Aid supports more than 2,000 children nationwide on a regular basis and does not let go of their hands even in an epidemic situation,” Ambassador Lindsay is quoted in the aid organization’s report.