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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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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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 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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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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Kurzweil bet the Pentagon would field the first autonomous machines. Instead a taxi company did — and the guided bullet is still a patent, not a procurement line.
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Kurzweil bet the 2020s on Drexler-style diamondoid assemblers. The bloodstream got programmable nanostructures anyway — built from DNA, not diamond.
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El Capitan beat Kurzweil’s 2005 supercomputer forecast by a factor of 5,000. Your desktop missed it by one hundred.
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GPT-4.5 passed a three-party Turing test in 2025 — four years ahead of Kurzweil’s 2029 bet. But the machine that crossed the line was not the one he predicted would.
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Kurzweil predicted the Turing test would fall in 2029. GPT-4.5 passed it in 2025 — four years early, by a path he didn’t predict.
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Ten Kurzweil claims from 2005, graded against 2026 data: adoption curves compressed faster than he predicted, B2B e-commerce blew past his trillion-dollar marker tenfold, and the Luddite backlash he pushed to the 2030s is already in the room.