-
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.
-
The NSA quietly patented a reversible-computing fluxon circuit in 2024. Vaire taped out a chip that recovers half its energy in 2025. Kurzweil predicted this twenty years ago — but the path looks different than he drew it.
-
After two decades as an interesting blob in a dish, the organoid is quietly being completed. Twenty-four USPTO grants this year alone teach the missing parts: blood vessels, nerves, immune cells, and electrode arrays.
-
Carbon nanotubes were supposed to replace silicon. The Internet was supposed to route around failures. Both bets aged badly.
-
Two dozen US patents in five years describe how to break the C-F bond. The trash company, a Battelle spinoff, and a Northwestern lab are all attacking it differently.
-
Lanier said software was too brittle to scale. Twenty-one years later, transformers and evolutionary code search make the case for Kurzweil’s self-organizing bet.
-
Rondo Energy has 44 US patents on bricks heated to 1,000°C by solar, aimed at the steam crackers, smelters, and refineries that batteries can’t touch.
-
Kurzweil bet that humor and claimed feelings would settle the consciousness debate by the 2030s. The capability arrived four years early. The debate did not end — it intensified.
-
Eleven recent US patents stop trying to build a Climeworks-sized DAC plant and start bolting CO2 capture onto things that already exist.
-
Six 2005 society-scale predictions, graded against 2026 patent grants, FDA rules, GDP data, and Meta’s Reality Labs balance sheet.
-
UCF’s research foundation holds five US patents on extracting water and building bricks from lunar regolith. Blue Origin holds one. NASA, two.