Welcome to 2025—a world of benevolent AI, robot assistants, biological breakthroughs, and the general promise of the future. Exponential progress unfolding across all fields of human endeavor. Speaking of which, how many such fields are there, exactly?
For one route to an answer, we turn to the journal Nature, which in 2020 celebrated 150 years of publication. For this occasion, Kelly Krause and her team at Nature teamed up with Laszlo Barabási to create a stunning interactive visualization of over a century of interdisciplinary scientific publication.
Gorgeous as it was, the project didn’t provide a tidy final count. So I turned to ChatGPT. After some prompt argument, it produced a range: anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 fields. That lower bound includes well-known academic disciplines, common professions, and established trades, while the upper limit adds up the micro-specialties, emerging tech fields, and all the global variations. Let’s meet in the middle and say there are around 100,000 possible human endeavors. Good enough to move on.
The same unstoppable progress that gave us AI has lead to transformative leaps in the world of biology. Over the past few decades, imaging and recording technology dramatically improved, enabling researchers to capture orders of magnitude more data. But this is messy, biological data. Photos or even electron scans of tissues; spike recordings from hundreds of cells.. tools for cleaning up data enough for analysis lagged. A few research groups have tried crowdsourcing through platforms like Zooniverse, EteRNA, Borderlands, and EyeWire (where I’ve spent the past 12 years). What we really need is better AI to augment the most difficult tasks.
Thankfully, it’s somewhat here. Computational biology is not only leading to tremendous discoveries like new brain maps and cures for diseases, but biology is getting a glow up from the results, thanks to Blender tool developers like Brady Johnston and animators like Tyler Sloan.
Many modern imaging techniques produce 3D data that are increasingly being used in publications and to make publicly available scientific resources. There will be many new scientific visualizations this year.
Imagine learning biology alongside visualizations like this:
Isn’t biology infinitely more intuitive when you can actually see what’s happening? Grasp with a glance. It’s like comparing a detailed map to a text description of that map.
Speaking of seeing, the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition dropped its 2024 winners, and it’s like peeking into an alien universe. If you can identify every image, legend says you will be knighted and granted land on the Moon. From plants to dinosaur bones, the 10x-60x magnification world is a portal to the little neighbors you never knew you had.
On the opposite end of reality, 2025 promises AI generated content that’s basically indistinguishable from the real thing. Most of us fell for the Shanghai drone show. This year we need a company that plants an IRL tag on media.
Finally, AI-powered video generation is primed to kick off an entertainment Renaissance. Small teams will soon be able to spin up blockbuster-grade films that previously would have taken tens of millions of dollars and entire studios. Just imagine the surge of new shows and movies in the pipeline. It’s going to be wild.
One thing’s for sure: 2025 is shaping up to be spectacular.
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