World Solve

Local elections often receive far less security attention than national ones, despite being just as vulnerable to disinformation campaigns. Extending stronger protections down to the local level remains incomplete.

Artificial lighting confuses migration patterns, hunting behavior, and reproduction cycles in many nocturnal species, yet city lighting keeps expanding with growth. A widely adopted, wildlife-friendly lighting standard remains missing.

Farms produce enormous amounts of leftover plant material that mostly gets burned or discarded rather than turned into usable energy. Affordable, small-scale conversion technology could turn this waste into a valuable resource.

Despite decades of robotics research, folding laundry or loading a dishwasher remains far harder for robots than tasks like chess or driving. Everyday physical tasks turn out to be a much harder problem than expected.

Genuine altruism seems to require giving without expectation, yet human relationships often naturally involve some sense of reciprocal obligation. This unresolved tension complicates our understanding of charity, friendship, and generosity.

Forests act as natural carbon sinks, but increasingly severe wildfires are turning some forests from carbon absorbers into carbon emitters faster than they can regrow and recover. Reversing this shift remains an unresolved climate feedback challenge.

Fraudulent recall notices, generated to appear official, could mislead consumers into either unnecessary returns or ignoring genuine safety recalls entirely. Verifying the authenticity of recall communications quickly remains an unresolved consumer safety issue.

Concrete and asphalt trap heat, turning cities into dangerous hot zones during extreme weather, especially for people without air conditioning. Redesigning cities to stay cooler is now a matter of public safety, not comfort.

Turning seawater into drinking water is technically possible but still too energy-intensive and expensive for many water-scarce regions. Cheaper desalination could solve water shortages for millions of people.

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.

We know roughly when life began, but not the exact chemical steps that turned non-living matter into something that could reproduce. Solving this would also tell us where else in the universe life might arise.

Develop standards, sensing, urban design, and public awareness interventions to reduce disruption of insects, birds, turtles, and nocturnal ecosystems.

Improve local forecasting, storage, allocation, and conflict-resolution systems as glacier melt changes the timing and reliability of river flows.

Develop scalable methods to harvest, process, and use invasive water plants without spreading them further or introducing toxins into feed, compost, or consumer goods.