Walpurgis crafts

Unleash your creativity and craft with us during the Walpurgis weekend!

From Thursday to Sunday, we’ll be folding paper cranes, creating chromatography art, and building MOFs.

Paper cranes symbolize peace and the innocent victims of nuclear weapons, largely due to the story of Sadako Sasaki. She was two when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima and later developed leukaemia from the radiation. Following the Japanese belief that folding 1,000 paper cranes grants a wish, Sadako began folding cranes when she became ill. The struggle against nuclear weapons has over the years been recognized with several Nobel Prizes.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to researchers who developed materials with entirely new functions. The laureates succeeded in creating porous metal–organic frameworks, abbreviated MOFs from the English metal-organic framework. These structures contain large cavities where other molecules, such as gases, can move in and out.

In chemistry, it is sometimes necessary to separate mixtures—that is, to distinguish between different molecules. Chromatography (‘color writing’ from Greek) is one such separation method. The 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the discovery of chromatography.