Microsoft founder Bill Gates, in his tweet on Twitter, challenged innovators who think easy to get creative ideas to find solutions to ten challenges he sees facing the world.
This challenge was accompanied by a link to an article for "MIT Review" entitled "Ten Big Challenges that Technology Can Solve", and included an overview of the major challenges facing humanity.
Gates' tweet in which he challenged innovative minds to find solutions (social media)
1.Recycling carbon dioxide
A growing number of startups are exploring ways to recycle carbon dioxide into products, including synthetic fuels, polymers, carbon fiber and concrete.
This is promising, but what we will really need is a cheap way to store billions of tons of carbon dioxide that will solve the issue of carbon emissions.
2.Grid-scale energy storage
Many scientists and startups are working to develop cheaper forms of grid-wide energy storage that last for longer periods, including flow batteries or molten salt tanks, and in both cases we urgently need a cheaper and more efficient way to store massive amounts of Electricity.
3.Global influenza vaccine
At least 50 million people died in the 1918 influenza pandemic, and about a million people died in 1957-1958 and 1968, while about half a million people died in 2009, because the viruses were more temperate.
But we may not be so lucky the next time, as a particularly powerful virus strain can replicate so much that no specially designed vaccine can effectively fight it.
The development of a universal influenza vaccine that not only protects against relatively less harmful variants, but also against any catastrophic outbreaks once in a century is a critical public health challenge. At least 50 million people died in the 1918 flu pandemic.
4.Treatment for dementia
Alzheimer's disease remains vague, as definitive diagnoses can only be made after symptoms appear, and even then doctors debate the distinction between Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.
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However, developments in neuroscience and genetics are starting to shed more light on the disease, and this understanding provides clues as to how to slow or even stop the devastating effects of the condition.
5.Ocean Cleanup
Billions of tiny bits of plastic called "microplastics" float around the world's oceans, and much of this waste comes from bags or straws that have been broken up over time, and they poison birds, fish and humans.
Researchers fear the effects on human health and the environment are profound, and it could take hundreds of years to clean up the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic that have accumulated over the decades.
Billions of small pieces of "microplastics" float around the world's oceans (Reuters)
6.Desalination with less energy
The salt water on Earth represents 50 times the freshwater, and as the world population grows and climate change intensifies the droughts the need for fresh water will increase even more.
Israel has built the largest seawater reverse osmosis facility in the world, and it now gets most of its domestic water from the sea, but this method uses a lot of energy to become a worldwide operation.
Electrochemical techniques and the creation of a new type of membrane may help make salt water useful for irrigation, and creating drinking water from the ocean should be a top priority.
7.A safe self-driving car
Tested autonomous vehicles for millions of kilometers on public roads, but driverless cars are still not ready to control roads in general, because they have a problem with dealing with chaotic traffic, and difficult weather conditions such as snow and fog.
If it can be reliably made safe, it may allow the restructuring of transportation, and traffic congestion may be eliminated. With the emergence of self-driving cars, it is expected that most of the deaths resulting from traffic accidents will disappear, knowing that they amounted to 1.25 million people annually.
8.Artificial Intelligence Control
Many researchers say that true general artificial intelligence may depend on the ability to link internal computations with real things in the physical world, and that artificial intelligence will acquire this ability by learning to interact with the physical world as humans and animals do.
9.Earthquake prediction
We can predict hurricanes days in advance and sometimes weeks in advance, but earthquakes still come as a surprise.
Predicting earthquakes with some confidence in the medium term would allow planners to discover durable solutions, and giving a warning for at least hours would allow people to evacuate unsafe areas and could save millions of lives.
10.Decoding the brain
Our brains remain a deep mystery to neuroscientists, everything we think about and remember and all of our movements must be encoded in one way or another in the billions of neurons in our heads.
There are still many unknowns and mysteries in understanding the way our brains store and communicate our thoughts. Understanding this could lead to breakthroughs in how we treat mental disorders like schizophrenia and autism.
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