About "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x.
"Overall, our results deepen understanding of the evolution of knowledge and may guide career planning and science policy. To promote disruptive science and technology, scholars may be encouraged to read widely and given time to keep up with the rapidly expanding knowledge frontier. Universities may forgo the focus on quantity, and more strongly reward research quality56, and perhaps more fully subsidize year-long sabbaticals. Federal agencies may invest in the riskier and longer-term individual awards that support careers and not simply specific projects57, giving scholars the gift of time needed to step outside the fray, inoculate themselves from the publish or perish culture, and produce truly consequential work. Understanding the decline in disruptive science and technology more fully permits a much-needed rethinking of strategies for organizing the production of science and technology in the future."
Making a jumping spider eye with nanophotonics and computer vision: depth from defocus with an integrated mentalens sensor!
Some in the ACT might be familiar with the concept...
Great engineering feat from Capasso's idea - an integrated flat lens electrically controlled enabling dynamic beam steering. Reconfigurabilility is the aim. The lens can be used microscope systems, holographic and projection imaging, LIDAR and laser printing. Besides working now on the mid-IR, visible light is the target.
"What if running the 26.2 miles of a marathon only felt like running 24.9 miles, or if you could improve your average running pace from 9:14 minutes/mile to 8:49 minutes/mile without weeks of training?"
"Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional scientists, academics and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures and ideas and also write in the margins."
Interesting way of analyzing research in the 21st century
"In contrast to conventional multipixel cameras, single-pixel cameras capture images using a single detector that measures the correlations between the scene and a set of patterns. However, these systems typically exhibit low frame rates, because to fully sample a scene in this way requires at least the same number of correlation measurements as the number of pixels in the reconstructed image."
"Gravity spoils the symmetry regardless of whether magnetic monopoles exist or not. This is shocking. The bottom line is that the symmetry cannot exist in our universe at the fundamental level because gravity is everywhere"
Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. They are now back in nano-form as "nanoscale vacuum channel transistors" that combine the best of vacuum tubes and modern semiconductors into a single device.
This old-technology with a new twist could be useful for space applications due to broader temperature operational range and better radiation resilience - authors are with NASA Ames.