The problemsThe register

COVID took 326 days. The target for the next pandemic is 100 - a vaccine before the outbreak spirals.COVID compressed vaccine development from years to months; the goal is a repeatable 100 days from a new pathogen to authorized shots.

AI can already help with many kinds of thinking, but it still makes confident mistakes and struggles to carry a big job through on its own.Frontier models saturate most static benchmarks, yet reliable long-horizon autonomy, calibrated reasoning and a shared definition of general intelligence all remain open - so any single 'percent to AGI' is a guess dressed as a number.

Researchers have mapped a whole fly brain and a tiny piece of mouse brain. The hard part is scaling that detail across an entire mammal without losing or inventing connections.A whole adult fly is mapped at synapse resolution and a mouse cortical fragment now contains more than half a billion detected synapses; the whole mouse remains an estimated three orders of magnitude larger.

Rockets can now land and fly again, which made space far cheaper - but the truly cheap ticket needs a whole rocket you can reuse in days, and nobody has that yet.Reusable first stages have cut the price of orbit by more than 90% since the Shuttle, but the sub-$100/kg goal depends on rapid full reuse that Starship has not yet demonstrated.

Clean hydrogen could fuel steel, ships, and fertilizer. First it has to get cheap - and get built at scale.Electrolysis works; the open question is whether clean hydrogen can reach a few dollars a kilogram and scale to industrial volumes.

The space station recycles almost all its water, but a self-sustaining habitat still has to close air, food and waste loops at the same time.Water recycling is near exploration grade in orbit, but oxygen, food, waste and maintenance have never been closed together beyond Earth.

Machines can already pull carbon from the sky. The challenge is doing it cheaply - and a million times bigger.Plants that pull CO2 straight from the air are running; the open question is cost per tonne and scaling from thousands to billions of tonnes.

DNA can hold computer files in an extraordinarily small sample. The missing step is a useful machine that writes a large archive quickly, finds one file and costs less than today's cold storage.Synthetic DNA has recovered a 200 MB random-access archive without bit errors and automated a complete write-to-read cycle for five bytes, but no public benchmark joins useful payload, throughput, retrieval and cost.

Small cells can now make ammonia from nitrogen reliably for days, but they are still far too slow and energy-hungry to replace an ammonia plant.Verified lithium-mediated cells now combine high selectivity with continuous operation, but no system has simultaneously demonstrated industrial current density, energy efficiency, scale and lifetime.

Hot rock is everywhere underground. The race is to build the plumbing to reach it - cheaply, safely, and at the scale of a real power plant.The physics of engineered reservoirs is proven; the open question is whether they can be drilled cheaply, run for years, and financed at utility scale.

We know more than 6,000 planets beyond our Solar System, but zero confirmed living ones. The next leap needs a telescope that can separate an Earth-like planet from a star ten billion times brighter.Atmospheric spectroscopy is now routine for some large exoplanets, but no world beyond Earth has yielded a confirmed biosignature; the observatory intended to survey nearby potentially habitable worlds remains in development.

Today's quantum computers are too error-prone to trust. Fixing that means going from a handful of good qubits to millions.Error-corrected qubits have crossed below threshold; the open question is scaling from one logical qubit to the millions a useful machine needs.

Robots can walk, run and keep their balance beautifully now. The hard part left is hands and judgment: doing varied tasks all day, safely, without a human quietly steering.Legged locomotion is essentially solved, but dexterous manipulation and open-world autonomy are not, so today's factory and home robots run narrow, supervised, and heavily teleoperated.

We can slow parts of aging in animals; proving that people gain many healthy years will take long, careful trials that are only just starting.Multiple interventions now reproducibly slow aging in mice, but no treatment has yet shown a large, durable extension of healthy lifespan in humans.

Making cement pumps out huge amounts of CO2. New recipes and capture can slash it - if they stay cheap enough to use everywhere.Cement is about 8% of global CO2; low-clinker chemistries and carbon capture can cut it deeply, but not yet at commodity cost and scale.

We have made a tiny star flash in a laboratory; now we have to turn that flash into a dependable power station.Fusion has crossed scientific breakeven, but an economical power plant still requires a much harder engineering breakeven.

We have moved one harmless asteroid. The bigger gap is seeing a dangerous one early enough: more than half of the estimated regional-size population is still unknown.Humanity has demonstrated one asteroid-deflection technique, but the survey needed to find regional-scale threats is only halfway to its statutory goal.

Materials squeezed to crushing pressures lose resistance when nearly warm, but nothing verified works in an ordinary room - and the loudest recent claims turned out to be wrong.Superconductivity near room temperature has only been credibly observed under megabar pressures; every ambient-pressure room-temperature claim has failed replication or been retracted.

Electrodes read the brain's signals for speech. The race is to make them fast, accurate, and durable enough for daily life.Implanted electrodes can already turn neural activity into words on a screen; the open questions are speed, vocabulary, and whether it lasts for years.

Thousands die waiting for organs. Gene-edited pig kidneys and hearts could close the gap - if they last.Gene-edited pig organs have kept people alive for months; the open question is whether they can replace human donors for years, not weeks.