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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Solar arrived ahead of Kurzweil’s schedule. The microscopic fuel cells he paired with it died in a Boston warehouse in 2013.
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U.S. ammonia-fuel grants jumped tenfold since 2022, and the same catalytic recipe is showing up in pickup trucks, tugboats, ship engines, and Pratt & Whitney’s turbofan IP.
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Kurzweil cited 1964 lower bounds as facts. By 2024 BB(5) had a machine-checked proof and BB(6) needed pentation notation.
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Alphabet’s TidalX has 51 US patents on cameras, anti-startling robot policies, and optical-flow water-current estimators. Salmon farms are the AV stack’s first profitable second act.