World Solve

Effective vaccines exist for a small number of sexually transmitted infections, but many common ones still have no vaccine available at all. Expanding vaccine coverage here could significantly reduce global disease burden.

Agencies tasked with overseeing complex fields like AI or cybersecurity sometimes have few employees who deeply understand the technology they're regulating. This expertise gap can lead to rules that are either too vague or poorly targeted.

Fewer reporters are left covering city councils, local courts, and regional agencies, meaning much of everyday governance now happens with almost no public scrutiny. This local news gap makes accountability at the community level far harder to maintain.

Even where donation limits exist, wealthy donors can often find legal workarounds through political action groups or indirect spending. This keeps outsized influence in the hands of a few, regardless of formal campaign finance rules.

Fewer people are voting even in countries with a long history of democratic participation, suggesting something deeper than simple apathy is at play. Understanding and reversing this trend remains an open challenge for democratic governance.

Citizens are often legally entitled to request government records, but agencies can slow-walk or deny these requests with few real consequences. This makes transparency laws look stronger on paper than they are in practice.

Losing species and healthy ecosystems carries real economic consequences, from reduced crop pollination to fewer new medicines, but this cost rarely shows up clearly in economic decision-making. Building this into policy remains largely unresolved.

Wages in many countries have grown more slowly than housing, healthcare, and food costs over the past few decades, steadily eroding real purchasing power. Reversing this trend remains a central unresolved economic challenge.

In many regions, a lack of real competition among providers allows companies to charge more than a competitive market would allow. Enforcing genuine competition in these industries remains a persistent regulatory challenge.

Because rare diseases affect few patients, there's often little financial incentive for researchers or companies to develop treatments. Thousands of rare conditions remain effectively untreated as a direct result.

Unlike infectious diseases, cancer arises from a person's own cells mutating, making a universal vaccine far more complex to design. Progress exists for a few cancer types, but a broadly effective approach remains unsolved.

Sphere-packing problems are solved for a few specific dimensions, but the general pattern across all possible dimensions remains unknown. This affects fields ranging from error-correcting codes to theoretical physics.

A small number of factories in a few countries currently produce the vast majority of the world's most advanced computer chips, creating serious supply chain risk if any single region faces disruption. Diversifying this manufacturing base remains a slow, capital-intensive challenge.

Phone batteries degrade noticeably after a couple of years of daily charging cycles, contributing to both consumer frustration and electronic waste from early device replacement. A more durable battery technology remains commercially elusive.

Battery life claims often assume light use, and demanding tasks like video editing or gaming can drain a laptop's battery in just a few hours. Meaningfully extending battery life under heavy real-world use remains an unresolved hardware challenge.

A language disappears roughly every few weeks somewhere in the world, often taking irreplaceable cultural knowledge with it. Without better preservation tools, much of human linguistic diversity may vanish within a generation.

Fewer working-age people are supporting more retirees in many countries, straining pension systems built for a different population balance. Without reform, current retirement systems risk running out of money for future retirees.

Despite regulation added after every major crash, financial systems keep finding new ways to become unstable. We still don't have a reliable way to prevent the next one before it happens.

Economic and political power increasingly concentrates in fewer hands, while regulation struggles to keep pace with how quickly this happens. Left unchecked, this threatens both economic fairness and democratic balance.

Bacteria are evolving resistance faster than pharmaceutical companies are creating new antibiotics to fight them. Left unresolved, common infections could become deadly again within a few decades.