World Solve

A seawall, air conditioner, reservoir, or drought-resistant crop can reduce one risk while increasing inequality, heat, debt, ecological damage, or downstream exposure. The challenge is evaluating full-system consequences before large investments are locked in. 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.

States may invest in national AI systems for education, law, defense, planning, and public administration. The unresolved problem is ensuring such systems remain bounded by law, reviewable by citizens, and resistant to capture by narrow interests. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

Overuse of antibiotics in health and agriculture breeds resistant pathogens. Stewardship programs and rapid diagnostics can reduce misuse.

Drug-resistant TB strains are spreading faster than diagnostic capacity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Portable AI-assisted chest X-ray screening and better contact-tracing apps could catch cases earlier.

Unregulated over-the-counter antibiotic sales and heavy use in livestock farming are breeding drug-resistant bacteria. Point-of-care rapid diagnostics could reduce unnecessary prescriptions.

Many older buildings in seismic zones like Nepal, Indonesia, and Turkey do not meet modern earthquake-resistant standards. Retrofit financing programs and stricter enforced building codes could save many lives.

Governments in several countries have tightened control over media and online speech, limiting independent journalism and civic discourse. Secure, censorship-resistant publishing platforms could help protect independent reporting.

Permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles reach -240°C, making metals and polymers brittle and prone to shattering. Special cryogenic-resistant alloys and thermal insulation jackets are required.

Energetic protons and electrons in Earth's Van Allen belts degrade standard solar panel efficiency over time. Radiation-hardened perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells are needed to maintain high power-to-weight ratios.

Closed space station biomes combined with radiation select for rapid bacterial mutation, risking astronaut health. Autonomous metagenomic sequencing systems must continuously monitor station surfaces for bio-threats.

In major agricultural and industrial manufacturing regions across East and South Asia, overuse of antibiotics in livestock and unmonitored factory discharge have accelerated the proliferation of drug-resistant pathogens, threatening global healthcare systems.

Traditional drought-resistant seed varieties are disappearing as farmers adopt commercial hybrid seeds, eroding genetic resilience against long-term climate shocks.

Resistant malaria strains have emerged in certain regions and are gradually spreading, threatening to undermine decades of progress against the disease. Coordinated, faster response to contain resistance before it spreads further remains incomplete.

Drug-resistant tuberculosis requires longer, more expensive, and more toxic treatment regimens that many patients in affected regions simply can't access or complete. This keeps a preventable disease deadly in the parts of the world least equipped to fight it.

Bacteria evolve resistance faster than new antibiotics are being developed and approved, creating a widening treatment gap. Without new approaches, once-treatable infections could become far deadlier again.

Tuberculosis remains a major killer in some regions, and drug-resistant strains are becoming harder and more expensive to treat. Slowing this resistance requires both better medicine access and improved treatment adherence support.

A small number of people show natural resistance to certain infections or conditions, and understanding why could reveal entirely new treatment approaches. This resistance remains only partially understood at a genetic level.

Certain simple-sounding tiling and packing puzzles remain surprisingly resistant to a complete general solution. These problems test the limits of combinatorics and geometric reasoning.

Combinatorial arrangement problems like this remain surprisingly resistant to full general solutions despite their simple appearance. This connects recreational mathematics with deeper unresolved questions in combinatorics.

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.