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…
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…
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…
Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now proves that, on a 200-year baseline, almost everything is up and to the right. Peter Thiel’s The End of the Future argues that, since 1973, almost nothing in the physical world is. Both can be true. The trick is to plot each metric on its own longest available baseline and see…
Peter Thiel said in 2011 that the future had stalled. Ray Kurzweil said in 2005 that the future was on schedule. Reading both texts now, with a 9.3-million-patent corpus running underneath them, the answer is that they were arguing about different decades — and that the inflection between those decades happened, with disconcerting precision, the…
What started as a search for hidden innovation in medical devices turned into something bigger — a vision for how AI-driven R&D will need to coordinate across fields, and the infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet.
Kurzweil’s curve kept bending. Almost none of the specific mechanisms he nominated to keep it bending actually arrived.
219 US patents for devices that read biomarkers from sweat — a category that barely existed before 2010. Half were granted in the last five years.
Twelve themes from the problem-graph argument, queried against 605 books and 320,090 chunks. What came back was one continuous argument across ten voices.
In 2024, the USPTO granted 21 patents for materials engineered to radiate heat through Earth’s atmosphere and into the vacuum of space. The technique requires zero electricity. The trick that made it work came from telecom.
Kurzweil bet on rotaxanes, nanotubes, and self-assembling polymers to carry computing past silicon. Twenty years later, only spintronics made it to market — and the brain got matched anyway.
A UCLA psychiatrist patented a device that plays your brain’s own deep-sleep frequency through your skull to clear Alzheimer’s plaque. Behind it: 64 patents, 144 clinical trials, and an FDA-approved device already treating patients.
Kurzweil predicted molecular computing as the sixth paradigm. What arrived was 3D-stacked silicon, reversible logic startups, and an AI power crisis nobody saw coming.
Kurzweil predicted strong AI via brain reverse-engineering. It arrived via transformers and text. Every destination was right. Every route was wrong.
CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, has 12 US patents on perovskite solar cell fabrication. The manufacturing DNA is nearly identical. A 48,000-paper field is about to meet the factory floor.