World Solve

GPS doesn't work well inside buildings, and alternative indoor positioning technologies haven't achieved the same reliability and ease of deployment needed for widespread augmented reality navigation use. Solving indoor positioning at scale remains unresolved.

Bots or incentivized fake responses can flood academic research surveys, introducing unreliable data that researchers may not always catch before drawing conclusions. Improving survey integrity verification remains an unresolved methodological challenge.

Video streaming quality can noticeably degrade during peak usage times even with a stable internet connection, since network congestion affects delivery regardless of a household's own bandwidth. Solving this at scale remains an unresolved infrastructure challenge.

Modern hearing aids remain prohibitively expensive for a large share of the global population that could benefit from them, leaving hearing loss untreated in many communities. Making this technology genuinely affordable at scale remains unresolved.

Many remote communities still lack consistent access to electricity because building traditional grid infrastructure to reach them is prohibitively expensive. Affordable, reliable off-grid alternatives remain incompletely developed and deployed at scale.

Storing renewable energy at the scale needed to fully support national power grids still requires battery technology that remains too expensive for widespread deployment. Closing this cost gap remains one of the biggest barriers to a fully renewable grid.

Many real-world problems, like planning delivery routes or scheduling, become exponentially harder to solve exactly as they grow in size. Faster methods for these problems could save enormous time and resources across industries.

Prime numbers appear to follow patterns at large scales but seem random up close, and mathematicians still lack a full explanation for this behavior. Understanding it better could improve encryption methods that rely on primes.

Many large-scale policies are implemented based on assumptions rather than solid evidence, and by the time results come in, the damage or waste is already done. Better testing methods could save enormous public resources.

Direct air capture exists, but it's still far too expensive and energy-intensive to make a dent in global emissions. Making it cheap enough to scale is one of the biggest levers left for slowing climate change.

Old phones, laptops, and batteries pile up in landfills, leaking toxic materials while valuable metals inside go to waste. A cheap, safe recycling process could turn a growing pollution problem into a resource stream.

AI can now produce convincing text, images, and video in seconds, and detection tools are struggling to keep up. Without a reliable way to tell real from fake, public trust in what we see online keeps eroding.

Current searches scan a tiny fraction of the sky and only for a narrow range of signals. Without better tools, we may be missing evidence of other intelligent life simply because we aren't looking in the right way.

Space contains vast amounts of metals and water that could support future industry and settlement, but the cost of extraction and transport remains far too high. Making this affordable could unlock a new resource economy beyond Earth.

We can now detect many dangerous asteroids years in advance, but we still lack a proven way to redirect or destroy one heading for Earth. One unlucky strike could cause damage on a civilization-ending scale.

Gravity describes the large scale universe well, and quantum mechanics describes the tiny scale well, but the two don't fit together mathematically. A unified theory would finally explain what happens inside black holes and at the birth of the universe.

Achieving protocols for equitable and rapid distribution of medical countermeasures in pandemics at meaningful scale demands simultaneous progress in fundamental research, engineering integration and socio-technical systems that work for low- and middle-income settings. Existing efforts remain fragmented relative to the magnitude of the challenge.

Despite recognition of its importance, reliable methods for teacher development platforms producing national-scale practice change are still lacking. Progress is hindered by incomplete mechanistic knowledge, high capital and operational barriers, and the absence of deployment models suited to the contexts of greatest need.

Achieving solutions for managing the growing burden of mental health conditions in young populations at meaningful scale demands simultaneous progress in fundamental research, engineering integration and socio-technical systems that work for low- and middle-income settings. Existing efforts remain fragmented relative to the magnitude of the challenge.

A persistent gap exists in realizing practical, scalable solutions for industrial-scale lunar propellant and structural material production. Scientific understanding, engineering readiness and institutional capacity remain insufficient to translate promising concepts into durable impact under real-world constraints of cost, skills and governance.