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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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Ten 2005-era predictions about employment, offices, VR services, IP, and nonbiological personhood — scored against what 2026 actually looks like.
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Kurzweil predicted students would attend class via full-immersion VR in the early 2010s. It happened via Zoom in 2020. Twelve predictions, graded.
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Kurzweil predicted immersive VR would kill live music, build a digital playground, and wire nanobot-enhanced teenagers past Olympians. Live music just grossed $9.5B. The playground arrived on phones. The enhanced athletes arrive in Las Vegas next month — without a single nanobot.
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In 2005, Kurzweil used neuroscience receipts to build an upload argument. Twenty-one years later, seven of ten hold. One is off by two orders of magnitude — and the retinal-implant prediction arrived, over a pile of abandoned patients.
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Twenty years after Kurzweil predicted detailed models of hundreds of human brain regions by 2025, the deadline has arrived — and the delivery looks nothing like what he described.
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FlyWire mapped 140,000 neurons in an adult fruit fly. MICrONS mapped 523 million synapses in a cubic millimeter of mouse cortex. Neither matches the story Kurzweil told in 2005 about archiving human minds — but the paths we took to get here tell their own.
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Every 2004 nanotech demo Kurzweil cited as proof of molecular manufacturing’s trajectory was real. The trajectory wasn’t.
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Kurzweil predicted self-replicating medical nanobots by the 2020s. The bloodstream got lipid spheres instead.
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Kurzweil’s 2005 computing predictions split along a clean line: bolt a computer to a face and it ships; bolt one to a star and twenty-one years of exponential scaling has not moved it.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: The 2005 Receipts Cashed Out — and the Wave That Actually Hit Wasn’t in the Book
Batch 54: ten claims from 2005 about AI being everywhere, plus one forward bet on VR. The 2005 examples were all real. None of them was the mechanism that mattered.