Historical Perspectives

Breakthrough Thinking, DaVinci Institute, Futurist, Higher Education, Historical Perspectives, People Making a Difference

The Rise of Strategic Futurism: Thomas Frey’s Path to Industry Leadership

August 23, 2025

How One Futurist Redefined the Rules of Tomorrow’s Discourse

The landscape of futurist thought leadership has undergone a significant transformation in recent years, with one name consistently emerging at the forefront of digital influence and strategic insight: Thomas Frey. Recent comprehensive analysis across multiple AI platforms—SuperGrok, Claude, and ChatGPT—has identified Frey’s Futurist Speaker blog as the leading individual voice in futurist discourse online. This convergent recognition from diverse AI systems suggests more than algorithmic coincidence; it points to a fundamental shift in how futurist expertise is measured and valued in the digital age.

Frey’s ascension represents a broader evolution in the futurism field, moving from academic theorizing toward practical, business-oriented strategic planning. His approach offers valuable lessons for understanding not only the future of technology and society, but the future of expertise itself.

AI, Historical Perspectives, Space, Space Flight

Curiosity 2.0: How NASA’s 13-Year-Old Mars Rover Just Got a Brain Boost

August 15, 2025

Thirteen years into its mission, NASA’s Curiosity rover is proving that age doesn’t have to mean decline—it can mean evolution. This nuclear-powered veteran of the Martian surface just got a mental makeover, gaining the ability to multitask, manage its own naps, and stretch every watt of power like never before.

The rover’s new capabilities aren’t just engineering flexes—they’re survival tactics. Curiosity relies on a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG) powered by slowly decaying plutonium. As the years tick by, the available energy shrinks, making efficiency the currency of survival. The upgrades let Curiosity relay data to orbiters while still driving, maneuvering its robotic arm, or snapping pictures—compressing days of work into hours, and keeping heaters and instruments active for less time.

Education, Higher Education, Historical Perspectives, People Making a Difference

The Great Educational Awakening:Why Learning Must Become Earning

August 3, 2025

The most profound question facing humanity isn’t whether AI will change education—it’s whether we’ll have the courage to let it save us from an educational system that’s systematically failing millions while enriching a privileged few.

The Uncomfortable Truth We’re All Avoiding

Why do we persist with an educational model that transforms curious five-year-olds into debt-laden twenty-two-year-olds who can recite Shakespeare but can’t balance a budget, code a website, or solve real-world problems? Simon Sinek reminds us to start with why, so let’s ask the uncomfortable question: What if our entire approach to education is fundamentally backwards?

Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

The first mobile phone call was 75 years ago – what it takes for technologies to go from breakthrough to big time

June 19, 2021

An engineer demonstrates a car phone five months before the historic first call on a competing company’s commercial mobile telephone service in 1946.

By Daniel Bliss, Arizona State University

I have a cellphone built into my watch. People now take this type of technology for granted, but not so long ago it was firmly in the realm of science fiction. The transition from fantasy to reality was far from the flip of a switch. The amount of time, money, talent and effort required to put a telephone on my wrist spanned far beyond any one product development cycle.

The people who crossed a wristwatch with a cellphone worked hard for several years to make it happen, but technology development really occurs on a timescale of decades. While the last steps of technological development capture headlines, it takes thousands of scientists and engineers working for decades on myriad technologies to get to the point where blockbuster products begin to capture the public’s imagination.

The first mobile phone service, for 80-pound telephones installed in cars, was demonstrated on June 17, 1946, 75 years ago. The service was only available in major cities and highway corridors and was aimed at companies rather than individuals. The equipment filled much of a car’s trunk, and subscribers made calls by picking up the handset and speaking to a switchboard operator. By 1948, the service had 5,000 customers.

Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

17 things you’ve already forgotten happened in 2020

January 2, 2021

By Jeva Lange

17-things-you've-already-forgotten-happened-2020

At long, long, long last, this weird and horrible year is ending. But however much it might feel like it, a pandemic was not the only thing to happen in 2020.

Here are 17 of the biggest, bizarrest, space-aliens-exist-est moments of the year that you’ve already forgotten happened.

Analysis, DNA, Environment, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

Researchers reveal a much richer picture of the past with new DNA recovery technique

September 17, 2020

A shot of the Klondike region in the Yukon, where the permafrost samples containing sediment DNA, were collected.

Researchers at McMaster University have developed a new technique to tease ancient DNA from soil, pulling the genomes of hundreds of animals and thousands of plants—many of them long extinct—from less than a gram of sediment.

The DNA extraction method, outlined in the journal Quarternary Research, allows scientists to reconstruct the most advanced picture ever of environments that existed thousands of years ago.

The researchers analyzed permafrost samples from four sites in the Yukon, each representing different points in the Pleistocene-Halocene transition, which occurred approximately 11,000 years ago.

This transition featured the extinction of a large number of animal species such as mammoths, mastodons and ground sloths, and the new process has yielded some surprising new information about the way events unfolded, say the researchers. They suggest, for example, that the woolly mammoth survived far longer than originally believed.

Continue reading… “Researchers reveal a much richer picture of the past with new DNA recovery technique”

Analysis, Historical Perspectives, Internet, Science & Technology News

Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet, and no one preserved them

September 16, 2020

Most open-access journals lack the technical means and plans to preserve their articles, despite a mandate from some funders that they do so.

Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 2 decades as publishers stopped maintaining them, potentially depriving scholars of useful research findings, a study has found.

An additional 900 journals published only online also may be at risk of vanishing because they are inactive, says a preprint posted on 3 September on the arXiv server. The number of OA journals tripled from 2009 to 2019, and on average the vanished titles operated for nearly 10 years before going dark, which “might imply that a large number … is yet to vanish,” the authors write.

The study didn’t identify examples of prominent journals or articles that were lost, nor collect data on the journals’ impact factors and citation rates to the articles. About half of the journals were published by research institutions or scholarly societies; none of the societies are large players in the natural sciences. None of the now-dark journals was produced by a large commercial publisher.

Continue reading… “Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet, and no one preserved them”

communication, Crazy Stuff, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

How far back in time could a modern English speaker go and still communicate?

July 16, 2020

The transition from Old English to Modern English was a process, not an event

Changes in language don’t occur overnight, though slang terms come in and out of use relatively quickly and new words are invented while others fall into disuse. The rules of grammar you learned in school are the same ones your parents were taught and what your own kids will (or do) use. A few new words are tossed in the mix every few years to keep things interesting (remember the uproar when “ain’t” was added to the dictionary?).

The transition from Old English to Middle English to Modern English was a process rather than an event — the rules didn’t all suddenly change on May 24, 1503. Before the Normans invaded England in 1066, the people living in Britain spoke Old English or Anglo-Saxon. Some of the words from that time are still with us — the ones of the vulgar four-letter variety. Old English was so unlike Modern English it’s fair to view it as a foreign language. For example, here are the opening lines of the poem Beowulf:

Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum

þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon

hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon.

I’m completely lost. Something about a garden, maybe?

Modern English translation as follows:

Listen! We — of the Spear-Danes in the days of yore,

of those clan-kings — heard of their glory,

how those nobles performed courageous deeds.

Yeah, not even close.

Continue reading… “How far back in time could a modern English speaker go and still communicate?”

Coronavirus, Health & Fitness, Historical Perspectives, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

How Epidemics of the past changed the way Americans lived

April 11, 2020

Past public health crises inspired innovations in infrastructure, education, fundraising and civic debate

At the end of the 19th century, one in seven people around the world had died of tuberculosis, and the disease ranked as the third leading cause of death in the United States. While physicians had begun to accept German physician Robert Koch’s scientific confirmation that TB was caused by bacteria, this understanding was slow to catch on among the general public, and most people gave little attention to the behaviors that contributed to disease transmission. They didn’t understand that things they did could make them sick. In his book, Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Its Modern Prophylaxis and the Treatment in Special Institutions and at Home, S. Adolphus Knopf, an early TB specialist who practiced medicine in New York, wrote that he had once observed several of his patients sipping from the same glass as other passengers on a train, even as “they coughed and expectorated a good deal.” It was common for family members, or even strangers, to share a drinking cup.

With Knopf’s guidance, in the 1890s the New York City Health Department launched a massive campaign to educate the public and reduce transmission. The “War on Tuberculosis” public health campaign discouraged cup-sharing and prompted states to ban spitting inside public buildings and transit and on sidewalks and other outdoor spaces—instead encouraging the use of special spittoons, to be carefully cleaned on a regular basis. Before long, spitting in public spaces came to be considered uncouth, and swigging from shared bottles was frowned upon as well. These changes in public behavior helped successfully reduce the prevalence of tuberculosis.

As we are seeing with the coronavirus today, disease can profoundly impact a community—upending routines and rattling nerves as it spreads from person to person. But the effects of epidemics extend beyond the moments in which they occur. Disease can permanently alter society, and often for the best by creating better practices and habits. Crisis sparks action and response. Many infrastructure improvements and healthy behaviors we consider normal today are the result of past health campaigns that responded to devastating outbreaks.

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Coronavirus, Healthcare, Historical Perspectives, Medicine, Science & Technology News

The coronavirus isn’t alive. That’s why it’s so hard to kill.

March 28, 2020

This novel coronavirus is a sneaky variety similar to those that have been responsible for the most destructive outbreaks of the last 100 years.

Viruses have spent billions of years perfecting the art of surviving without living – a frighteningly effective strategy that makes them a potent threat in today’s world.

That’s especially true of the deadly new coronavirus that has brought global society to a screeching halt. It’s little more than a packet of genetic material surrounded by a spiky protein shell one-thousandth the width of an eyelash, and leads such a zombie-like existence, it’s barely considered a living organism.

But as soon as it gets into a human airway, the virus hijacks our cells to create millions more versions of itself.

There is a certain evil genius to how this coronavirus pathogen works: It finds easy purchase in humans without them knowing. Before its first host even develops symptoms, it is already spreading its replicas everywhere, moving onto its next victim. It is powerfully deadly in some, but mild enough in others to escape containment. And, for now, we have no way of stopping it.

Continue reading… “The coronavirus isn’t alive. That’s why it’s so hard to kill.”

government, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News, women

The year women became eligible to vote in each country

February 14, 2020

SUFFRAGE HAPPENED in 1920 in the United States, three years behind Russia and Canada but 91 years ahead of Saudi Arabia, as noted by this map depicting the year women became eligible to vote in each country. Countries began joining the fray en masse by the mid-twentieth century, but the leader of the pack comes from far down under — women in New Zealand obtained voting rights in 1893. This map was uploaded to Reddit and shows the year women became eligible to vote in each country.

A quick glance at the map tells only part of the story, however. Pay close attention to the asterisks, as the year noted for some countries signifies only limited suffrage, often only for white women or in conjunction with specific requirements such as homeownership or marriage. Belgium’s 1919 suffrage granted widows and the mothers of servicemen killed in World War I, or widows and mothers of servicemen “shot and killed by the enemy” the vote but didn’t extend the same rights to all women until 1948. Australia granted women excluding Aboriginals the right to vote in 1902. For a more complete list of exclusions, view the notes at the far bottom of the infographic.

Continue reading… “The year women became eligible to vote in each country”

communication, Engineering, Historical Perspectives, Internet, Science & Technology News

50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420

November 9, 2019

50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420

Here’s the story of the creation of ARPANET, the groundbreaking precursor to the internet—as told by the people who were there.

When I visited UCLA’s Boelter Hall last Wednesday, I took the stairs to the third floor, looking for Room 3420. And then I walked right by it. From the hallway, it’s a pretty unassuming place.

But something monumental happened there 50 years ago today. A graduate student named Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal and sent the first digital data transmission to Bill Duvall, a scientist who was sitting at another computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) on the other side of California. It was the beginning of ARPANET, the small network of academic computers that was the precursor to the internet.

Continue reading… “50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420”