I’m building tools that find hidden connections across scientific fields — using 9 million patents and 357 million academic papers to surface the cross-domain analogies that nobody is looking for. This is where I write about the work, the ideas, and the data emerging from the frontier.
-
Quiet Breakout: The Company Brewing Perfume From Pollution Is Nearly Broke. Its Patents Aren’t.
One rabbit-gut bacterium, 130 US patents, and a product ladder that climbs from steel-mill smoke to jet fuel, PET plastic, and Gucci perfume. The company is LanzaTech, its cash is nearly gone, and its patent machine just hit record output.
-
Quiet Breakout: The Jet-Engine Giants Quietly Own the Electric-Aviation Patent Race, and They’re Not Betting on Batteries
The eVTOL startups raised $15 billion and got the headlines. GE, Rolls-Royce, Pratt, and Safran hold three times as many US electric-propulsion patents, and every one of them keeps a turbine burning.
-
The World’s Best-Selling Drug Mops Up One Molecule. A Nerve Implant Just Got Approved to Do It With Electricity.
Humira soaks up TNF with an injected antibody. In August 2025 the FDA approved a one-minute-a-day nerve implant that hits the same molecule by flipping an immune reflex the body has had all along.
-
Quiet Breakout: One University Owns the Patent Race to Destroy Tumors With Sound
Histotripsy grants tripled to 12 in 2025, and Michigan plus its $2.25B spinout HistoSonics hold 83% of them. The mechanism is now migrating from liver tumors to the immune system.
-
Quiet Breakout: The Last Milk Protein Nobody Could Fake Is Finally Getting Patented
Whey and egg white fell years ago. Casein, the self-assembling micelle that makes cheese stretch and melt, is the hard one, and three US startups now hold 19 granted patents on building it without a cow.
-
Kurzweil Scorecard: The God We’re Manufacturing
Kurzweil said evolution moves toward God’s attributes — complexity, intelligence, creativity, love. Six of the seven are now for sale. The final entry in the scorecard.
-
Convergence Watch: A Shoe Company and a Car Company Own the Patent Race for Color With No Pigment
Nike holds 45 structural-color patents to Toyota’s 20. They build the same nanoscale optics filter, then point it in opposite directions.
-
Kurzweil Scorecard: The Universe Didn’t Wake Up. The Copy Did.
Kurzweil’s most mystical chapter predicted a conscious universe. What actually shipped was a patent to make a language model post on your behalf after you die.
-
Quiet Breakout: One Startup Owns the Patent Race to Delete a Bacterium’s ‘No’ and Retire the 1913 Fertilizer Reaction
Of 28 US patents since 2018 on engineered nitrogen-fixing crop microbes, Pivot Bio holds eight, more than anyone. The trick: deleting the gene that tells the bug to stop.
-
Kurzweil Scorecard: The Gray Goo Never Came. Its Safeguard Got Defeated Anyway.
The self-replicating nanobot Kurzweil feared was never built. But his argument about it — a determined adversary defeats any centralized safeguard — just came true in a biosecurity lab, with a number attached.