-
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.
-
Kurzweil predicted human-level AI by the mid-2020s. He got the direction right and the mechanism completely wrong.
-
The solid-state battery story in the US press is QuantumScape’s share price and CATL’s announcements. The patent data tells a different story. Toyota holds 200 of the 1,148 US solid-state battery grants issued since 2020 — 14x QuantumScape, eight times the US pure-plays combined. A slow-walking incumbent is still an incumbent.
-
Two patent clusters that barely knew about each other in 2000 — footwear and consumer electronics — have closed 16% of their distance by 2025. Nike has been patenting sensor-embedded sneakers at the rate of a mid-sized electronics company. Apple has three of its own.