It’s humanly impossible to know everything. Even though our brains are extraordinary and can store mass amounts of information, they're no match for the amount of data humans produce in a year or even a day.
However, this fact shouldn’t stop us from learning or discovering something new; after all, it helps us to feel happier and more fulfilled in our lives.
This is where the Instagram account “Yup That Exists” comes in, which provides its followers with the most peculiar and unique phenomena, inventions, and products most of us never knew existed. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s get comfortable and explore something yet undiscovered!
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We, as humans, have more information than ever before, with 90% of the world’s data being produced in the last two years. And every two years, its volume doubles in size.
While some of us might think that this would accelerate new discoveries even more, it turns out that isn’t the case. There’s been a significant decline in the number of scientific and technological innovations over time, according to a report published in Nature.
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Even though areas like artificial intelligence and biotechnology seem to be blooming, the same thing can’t be said about the fields outside them.
As of 2021, there were more than 8.8 million scientists worldwide, but the report published in Nature in 2023 called “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time” claims that we can see exponential growth in new scientific and technological knowledge, but it’s less likely to be groundbreaking and innovative.
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To prove this, the team behind the project analyzed 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from the past 60 years. They found that different fields of science saw a 90–100% slowdown from the high we saw back in the ’40s to early 2010s.
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The early 20th century witnessed discovery after discovery that drastically changed the way we lived and viewed the world. Some of them include the chemical process of nitrogen fixation, which allowed to feed billions, the structure of DNA, radio, general relativity, nuclear chain reactions, and so much more.
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Some attribute the current slowdown to the fact that all available innovations have already been made. The co-author of the report, Russell Funk, told Marketplace, “I mean, once you discover the electron or the theory of relativity, you can’t rediscover that, and everything else just seems a little bit less exciting, less monumental.”
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Meanwhile, others emphasize the amount of knowledge scientists are required to obtain to become specialists in the field, leaving less time for them to discover something new.
Furthermore, science has substantially grown over the years, and larger groups of people working together tend to approach science in different ways, which makes it more challenging to organize and achieve something monumental.
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Funk believes that the slowing down of new technology can affect the economy as it relies on progress in science and vice versa.
“And that’s not to say that we’re not seeing lots of really great progress in both science and technology. I mean, we see all these incredible breakthroughs in AI with ChatGPT. And we see recent breakthroughs with mRNA vaccines, and detection of gravity waves, and so forth,” he adds.
However, the science that’s being conducted right now tends to confirm the existing theories and knowledge rather than take it in a new direction.
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When asked if something could be changed, he highlights the funding process and how new projects are selected to be financed. Of course, the government wants to make sure that they are putting money into something that will have a tangible outcome that ends up pushing new products and supporting industries. And when a new project is submitted, it has to lay out its steps several years in advance. This might be a problem, as a lot of breakthroughs tend to be unexpected.
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So now experts are thinking about funding things in different ways. Some are suggesting that maybe it’s better to finance the scientists personally and not the specific objects. This way, it supports investigators in pursuing what they feel is the most significant problem at the time.
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