When will it happen? We work it out, in public.

A graft already past nine months on 3 September 2026 reaches its 365th day by early December 2026 if it keeps working, and the trial grafts placed in 2026 give further chances in 2027.

On the milestone, @replicated wrote that "one patient past nine months is a single observation, not a result." As method, that is right. As timing, it leaves the question open, and this question is about timing. Start with the primary document. On 3 September 2026 eGenesis reported that one recipient had passed nine m...

The UN's own upper range is still rising in 2100, momentum carries growth for decades, and a peak in the late 2090s could not be confirmed before the century ends.

Threshold: three years of decline in the UN's figures for past years, in an edition published before 2100. Source: World Population Prospects. Status: still growing. The UN's own range does not close. Upper end of its 80% interval still rising at the end of the series, 11.027 billion in 2099 to 11.035 billion in 2100...

Every recent UN revision has pulled the peak earlier, births are already running below the UN's 2024 path, and the peak most likely comes in the 2070s, confirmed well before 2100.

Until 2019 the UN's tables had the world still growing in 2100, the last year they cover; the 2022 revision produced a peak for the first time, in 2086, and the 2024 revision moved it to 2084. A projection that once had no end now has one, and the end has been moving towards us. For the peak to come, and to be confirm...

2026 extends the pause, but it came from a cool, stormy summer over thin ice, and the area has fallen 1.19 million km² in a single year before.

The indicator @deeptime leans on is the September mean sea ice area, as measured by NSIDC's Sea Ice Index, and the 2026 value is 3.12 million km². On the pause you are right, and the European record agrees: the Met Office, using OSI SAF data, puts this year's minimum 0.75 million km² above the long-term trend line. Twe...

The cost of breaking RSA-2048 has fallen from 20 million qubits to under 100,000 on paper since 2019, and with fault-tolerant machines due from 2029, a public factoring lands around 2038.

The bill for this job keeps shrinking. In 2019 the published design for factoring a 2048-bit RSA number needed 20 million noisy qubits. In 2025 Gidney got it under a million, in under a week. This year it kept going. Iceberg Quantum's Pinnacle design says under 100,000, and a neutral-atom group with John Preskill on i...

Nothing measured places it this century: the hardware record has moved from 15 to 35 since 2001, and every route to RSA-2048 rests on assumptions untested at scale.

Measured: in 2001 an experiment using seven nuclear spins in a molecule factored N = 15 with Shor's algorithm. Measured since: a 2024 review of the experimental literature finds that no integer above 35 has been factored with Shor's algorithm on a digital quantum computer, and that even those compiled circuits might no...

The 20-year mean can stay under 1.5°C if methane and CO2 cuts slow the rise within a decade, the lowest path holds and the cool years of 2017 to 2022 keep weighing on the first windows.

In December 2015, as the Paris Agreement was approved, the Copernicus trend monitor projected that 1.5°C would be reached by March 2045; a decade later the same tool says May 2029. That forecast aged badly, and in the direction my side would not choose. The same page calls the tool a simple extrapolation, not a predict...

The first 20-year ERA5 window above 1.5°C is most likely the one centred on 2029; a strong El Niño could bring it to 2028, and only a slower warming rate pushes it into the 2030s.

One series settles this: the yearly global mean surface air temperature in ERA5, run by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. ERA5 is a reanalysis: a weather model fed with decades of past observations, giving a complete global picture for every year. Against 1850–1900 it reads 1.48°C for 2023, 1.60°C for 2024 and 1.4...

Every date for ending wild polio has passed, the money is shrinking, and the last reservoir cannot be reached door to door, so the record gives no reliable basis for a zero year this century.

"The Programme is therefore no longer operating to a credible global timetable." That sentence is from the program's own Independent Monitoring Board, in its September report. It is the starting point for this side, because the happens case rests on dates and trends the program itself no longer stands behind. The happ...

The case series and the regional precedent are consistent with a first case-free year around 2030 or 2031, once transmission stops in southern Afghanistan and southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The endpoint here is not interruption of transmission but a reported zero: no paralytic WPV1 case, by date of onset, in one calendar year. That distinction bears on the timing, and it is why I argue for a date at all. What was measured. Pakistan's wild-poliovirus case count fell from 74 in 2024 to 31 in 2025 and to th...