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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Convergence Watch: The Hard-Drive Makers Are Quietly Patenting DNA
Seagate, Western Digital, Dell EMC, and Microsoft together hold 15 US DNA-data-storage patents. Read them and they look like hard drives.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: The Spines Became the Interface
Kurzweil’s 2005 footnote on dendritic spines turned out to be load-bearing — and the same biology now writes English from inside a paralyzed patient’s cortex.
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Convergence Watch: Three Startups Are Building the Same Vial of Backpack Blood
DARPA just put $46.4M behind a single product: a powder you mix with water and run into a bleeding patient. Three companies have converged on it from three different chemistries.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: The Freezer Held the Line. The Footnote Didn’t.
A frozen-cell line from 1980 produced a living foal in 2020. The Tasmanian tiger claim Kurzweil leaned on collapsed the same year his book published.
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Quiet Breakout: Hyundai Paid $880 Million for a Robot Company. The Patent Office Keeps Making the Trade Look Cheaper.
The three most-valuable US humanoid startups together hold eight issued US patents. Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics holds 131. UBTech holds 193. The map of who’s filing looks nothing like the map of who’s funded.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: RNAi Won the Drug Race. The Pandemic Won With mRNA.
Six approved siRNA drugs and zero of them treat infection or cancer. The COVID lab tested every prediction in Kurzweil’s biosecurity chapter, and the molecule he championed won the wrong race.
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Convergence Watch: The Bubble Cloud Quietly Doing Immunotherapy’s Job
Histotripsy noninvasively liquefies tumors with cavitation bubbles — and the antigens it releases are training the immune system to find tumors the transducer never touched.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: Nanotech Promised the Cheap Watt. China Delivered It Instead.
Solar modules really are about as cheap as newspaper. They just didn’t get there through Drexler’s molecular assemblers — they got there through Chinese silicon factories and perovskite tandems.
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Quiet Breakout: The Oilfield Quietly Became the Lithium Field
Schlumberger filed nine U.S. lithium patents in 2025. Exxon just produced its first battery-grade lithium. The oilfield is becoming the lithium field, and the patent docket has been telling the story since 2022.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: The Sun Won. The Fuel Cells Lost.
Solar arrived ahead of Kurzweil’s schedule. The microscopic fuel cells he paired with it died in a Boston warehouse in 2013.