I’m building tools that find hidden connections across scientific fields — using 9 million patents and 357 million academic papers to surface the cross-domain analogies that nobody is looking for. This is where I write about the work, the ideas, and the data emerging from the frontier.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: The Footnotes That Bit Back
Twenty years after The Singularity Is Near, some of the rebuttal chapters aged worse than the forecasts. The microtubule critics, the input-latency critics, and the reversible-computing skeptics all have new data.
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Quiet Breakout: Your Insurance Company Filed a Patent for an Anti-Ember Laser
USAA has more recent US patents than Palantir, Tesla, Spotify, Stripe, Cloudflare, and Airbnb combined. The filings include a laser turret for wildfire embers, a non-Newtonian hail shield, and a geothermal HVAC system.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: The Third Dimension Arrived. It Just Wasn’t Molecular.
Kurzweil bet the 2020s would bring three-dimensional computing. He was right about the destination and wrong about the path.
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Quiet Breakout: The Fields Are Getting 240-Watt Lasers and 36 Cameras
John Deere put vision-and-spray on five million acres in 2025 and halved herbicide use. The patent trail behind it starts in 2017 and nobody in the tech press noticed.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: Ubiquitous Computing Arrived in the Wrong Body
Kurzweil promised by the 2010s we’d wear computers in our clothing and see displays through our contacts. The destination came, but through phones, earbuds, and Ray-Bans — not the vehicles he named.
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Quiet Breakout: The Patents Teaching a Drill Rig to Survive Molten Rock
One Florida company has quietly assembled 16 US patents on drilling into magma. A Syracuse lab just proved the core trick works. Iceland drills KMT-1 in 2026.
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The papers being cited fastest in 2025 are not discoveries
SciPy 1.0 was published in February 2020. In the twelve months ending October 2025 it was cited 1,731 times. That is a five-year-old methods paper picking up roughly five new citations per day, with the rate still climbing. Its acceleration over the prior year is +94 per month, the third highest in the entire top-300…
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The research papers on fire right now, graded month by month
Most “trending papers” lists are annual cuts: how many times a paper got cited this year versus last. That misses the shape of the curve. A paper that quietly clocked 200 citations evenly across twelve months looks identical to one that went from 5 per month to 40 per month. The second is actually taking…
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What one ESC guideline is doing to the cardiomyopathy drug pipeline
In 2023 the European Society of Cardiology published its first comprehensive guideline on cardiomyopathies. OpenAlex has already logged more than 2,100 citations to that single document, a pace that puts it among the fastest-accelerating clinical papers of 2024. The guideline itself is not the story. The story is what it quietly codified: a drug class…