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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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Awareness has saturated; the bridges to radical life extension haven’t. A scorecard on Kurzweil’s longevity predictions twenty years on.
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367 US patents for doing math inside the memory itself have been granted since 2018. Nvidia holds none of them. Memory makers and a Princeton-spawned startup hold most of them.
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The 2020s were supposed to inflect life expectancy upward. They didn’t. But the molecular machinery Kurzweil predicted just entered human trials.
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A healthy boy was conceived in Guadalajara last year by a robot taking commands from New York, 3,700 km away. The patent record says the first robotic IVF lab is no longer hypothetical.
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Kurzweil predicted nano-fuel cells and microwings. We got lithium-ion automotive packs and FAA Stage 4 type certification — same destination, wrong chemistry.
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A 1998 migraine pill, an at-home antidepressant trial, and 39 patent grants in 2025 outline a quiet split inside psychedelic medicine.
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Schlumberger and Halliburton just spent 2025 patenting downhole NMR and pulsed-neutron tools tuned for lithium-7. The DLE race is being won by oilfield services contractors, not chemistry startups.
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Twenty years after The Singularity Is Near, some of the rebuttal chapters aged worse than the forecasts. The microtubule critics, the input-latency critics, and the reversible-computing skeptics all have new data.
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USAA has more recent US patents than Palantir, Tesla, Spotify, Stripe, Cloudflare, and Airbnb combined. The filings include a laser turret for wildfire embers, a non-Newtonian hail shield, and a geothermal HVAC system.
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Kurzweil bet the 2020s would bring three-dimensional computing. He was right about the destination and wrong about the path.