World Solve

Energy, computing, medicine, and infrastructure may depend on minerals with concentrated or fragile supply chains. Research must identify substitutes without trading scarcity for toxicity, low performance, or new ecological damage. 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.

Many future products will use composites, coatings, adhesives, and additives that make recycling technically or economically impossible. The challenge is creating high-performance materials whose full lifecycle is designed from the beginning. 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.

Clocks that accelerate or slow according to local output targets fracture shared temporal reference. The challenge is maintaining a common civic time base while still allowing local performance incentives.

AI agents may perform tasks once done by contractors, analysts, translators, and assistants. The challenge is creating rules for liability, taxation, attribution, and market fairness when human labor and machine labor overlap. The challenge is especially acute across multiple jurisdictions, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

AI agents may perform tasks once done by contractors, analysts, translators, and assistants. The challenge is creating rules for liability, taxation, attribution, and market fairness when human labor and machine labor overlap. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

Competence is often real but invisible to employers because certificates measure course completion rather than performance. Practical assessments, portable evidence, and trusted local validators could improve matching without forcing workers into expensive retraining. The opportunity is intentionally human-scale: a cooperative, clinic, workshop, school, or municipal team could pilot it within one locality and measure outcomes before expanding. Mathematical modeling can help with allocate uncertainty, incentives, or resource constraints; entrepreneurship can turn a reliable workflow into a viable service.

Unpaid domestic and care work performed predominantly by women in Papua New Guinea is largely excluded from national economic statistics and social protection policy, undervaluing its contribution.

Current approaches to affordable diagnostics and treatments for the leading causes of maternal mortality either underperform under variable field conditions or generate externalities that undermine long-term sustainability and equity. Closing the gap requires coordinated advances in science, systems design and enabling institutions.

Current approaches to solutions for providing safe and accessible public transport in rapidly growing secondary cities either underperform under variable field conditions or generate externalities that undermine long-term sustainability and equity. Closing the gap requires coordinated advances in science, systems design and enabling institutions.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for institutional arrangements that accelerate the adoption of proven public health interventions creates cascading risks across interconnected human and natural systems. Key missing elements include durable performance, low lifetime cost, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining impact beyond pilot stages.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for governance frameworks ensuring that advances in longevity science benefit all socioeconomic groups creates cascading risks across interconnected human and natural systems. Key missing elements include durable performance, low lifetime cost, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining impact beyond pilot stages.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for technologies enabling precise and low-impact application of agricultural inputs creates cascading risks across interconnected human and natural systems. Key missing elements include durable performance, low lifetime cost, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining impact beyond pilot stages.

Current approaches to technologies enabling the continuous monitoring of air quality and its health impacts at high resolution either underperform under variable field conditions or generate externalities that undermine long-term sustainability and equity. Closing the gap requires coordinated advances in science, systems design and enabling institutions.

Current approaches to cognitive and social interventions that improve collective problem-solving under uncertainty either underperform under variable field conditions or generate externalities that undermine long-term sustainability and equity. Closing the gap requires coordinated advances in science, systems design and enabling institutions.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for cryptographically private national-scale health data analytics creates cascading risks across interconnected human and natural systems. Key missing elements include durable performance, low lifetime cost, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining impact beyond pilot stages.

Verifying that voting machine software hasn't been secretly altered requires specialized technical audits that aren't consistently performed everywhere elections take place. Making this verification standard and accessible remains an unresolved election security challenge.

Automated captioning has improved significantly but still performs unevenly across different accents, dialects, and less common languages, leaving some users with far less accurate accessibility support than others. Closing this accuracy gap remains incomplete.

Recommendation systems tend to show users more of what they already agree with because that content performs better for engagement, gradually narrowing exposure to differing viewpoints. Correcting for this without reducing relevance remains an unresolved design challenge.

Video files, especially in high resolution, still require significant storage and bandwidth despite decades of compression research, and further meaningful improvements have become harder to achieve. This constrains streaming quality and cost, especially in areas with limited bandwidth.

Self-driving systems have improved dramatically in ideal conditions, but heavy rain, snow, or unusual road situations still challenge their sensors and decision-making. Achieving true all-condition reliability remains an unresolved engineering problem.