World Solve

Automated financial, information, military, and infrastructure systems may act in milliseconds while democratic institutions deliberate over months. The challenge is designing pre-authorized constraints, real-time oversight, and meaningful accountability. The solution must work with limited capital, intermittent services, and local maintenance capacity. The research opportunity is to define measurable success criteria, test the approach in realistic settings, identify failure modes, and create a pathway from prototype to accountable deployment.

Transit times to Mars and the outer planets require months to years of flight, increasing risk and cost. Breakthrough high-thrust, high-Isp propulsion systems—such as nuclear thermal or plasma engines—are critical.

While ion drives are fuel-efficient, their low thrust-to-weight ratio means orbital transfers take months or years. High-power, magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters operating at the multi-kilowatt level are needed.

Combination of high humidity and extreme ambient heat routinely exceeds human survivability thresholds during summer months, causing heatstroke and acute kidney injury.

Drained peat soils ignite during dry El Niño years, creating subterranean fires that burn for months, releasing enormous carbon emissions and toxic transboundary haze.

Chronic wounds, especially in diabetic patients with poor circulation, can take months to heal or never fully heal, increasing risk of serious infection. A more effective, widely accessible treatment approach remains needed.

Most people recover fully from mononucleosis, but a smaller group experiences prolonged fatigue and other symptoms for months afterward, and this difference isn't fully explained. Better understanding could improve care for this subset of patients.

Some patients experience persistent fatigue for months after major surgery that goes beyond typical recovery time, and the reasons for this aren't fully understood. Better prevention and treatment of post-surgical fatigue remains an underexplored area.

Post-viral fatigue syndromes, including long COVID, leave some patients exhausted for months or years after the initial infection has cleared, and the biological mechanism remains unclear. Understanding this could unlock treatment for a currently poorly understood condition.

Patients sometimes continue to experience pain months or years after the original injury has healed, suggesting the nervous system itself has changed in ways doctors don't fully understand. Solving this could transform treatment for chronic pain conditions.

Many new parents experience postpartum depression that goes undiagnosed or untreated for months, affecting both their wellbeing and their infant's early development. Faster detection and more accessible treatment remain unmet needs.

Patients often go through months of chemotherapy or other treatments before doctors learn whether it's actually working for their specific cancer. Better predictive tools could spare patients ineffective treatment and its side effects.

Mistakes in identity documents, tax records, or benefit eligibility can take months or years to fix, causing real harm in the meantime. A faster, more citizen-friendly correction process remains missing in most bureaucracies.

A meaningful share of people who contracted COVID-19 continue experiencing fatigue, brain fog, or other symptoms long after recovery, with no reliably effective treatment yet available. This remains a significant and only partially understood health burden.

Develop storage approaches that shift renewable energy across weeks or months rather than only across hours, without prohibitive material or infrastructure costs.

Tuberculosis treatment in Mexico requires six or more months of consistent dosing, but migrant and seasonal workers frequently relocate mid-treatment, breaking continuity of care and driving drug-resistant strains.