As a follow-up to my previous post on underrated research areas, here is a list of other ideas I find interesting:
Hash-functions Based on NP Problems: It would be nice to have a hash function known to be secure. It might be straightforward to do reverse 3-SAT problems where one constructs a 3-SAT problem from a given answer. If this is the case, it would be hard to invert the function (solve the 3-SAT problem) but easy to verify that the solution is correct (though I’m not sure if there would be lots of collisions). This would give proof-of-work systems a useful task to complete.
One-time Programs: A cryptographic primitive that allows a user to run a program once, this would unlock a number of interesting applications. One limitation is the requirement for a small amount of secure hardware. But there is some interesting work on making this possible with existing services.
Certifiable Random Numbers: It’s possible to generate truly random numbers using quantum entanglement and a small random seed, assuming that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Can small groups of individuals generate private keys using a small amount of quantum computation?
Computational Mechanics: Epsilon machine reconstruction seems useful for understanding neural networks, interpreting them, and identifying agents in physical systems.
Dyson’s Eternal Intelligence: What conditions of our cosmology would allow us to complete an infinite amount of computation?
Post-horizon Computing: If you are willing to make a one-way trip into a black hole, you may be able to observe solutions to computationally hard problems and engage in faster-than-light communication (though that communication can never leave). What are the limits of computation once you pass behind an event horizon?
Reversible Computing: This would dramatically lower the energy costs of computation. This might be a key enabling technology for brain emulations.
Entanglement-based Energy Transfer: It’s possible to use entangled bits and a heat bath to transfer useful work purely via communication. Can we do this in practice? Could we transfer work into a black hole and reduce it’s entropy?
Physical Unclonable Functions: Useful for identity systems and secure hardware.
MM Wave Mining: Quaise is using gyrotrons to vaporize rock and drill deeper geothermal wells. Could the gasses they generate be collected to cheaply obtain useful minerals or build tunnels?
Particle Beams for Asteroid Prospecting and Redirection: Laser coupled particle beams can maintain small spot sizes for extraordinary distances. This makes me think: could we use these beams to ablate asteroids and observe their elemental composition from afar? If we can ablate one side of an asteroid, could we steer it out of orbit? This would make asteroid mining and defense far easier.
Terraforming Venus: Mars and the moon get all the attention, but Venus is another potential destination for life. The existing proposals to inhabit or terraform Venus are unsatisfying to me. Instead of settling for airships or bombarding the surface with asteroids, starlifting hydrogen from the sun and reacting Venus’ atmosphere into organic compounds seems better.
Solar Effects on Albedo: Solar panels absorb a lot of light and generate heat, if we build enough of them, will this significantly increase the Earth’s albedo? Will it have effects on local climates? Is it feasible to put infrared reflectors on solar panels to reduce heating?
Cryptographically-provable Geolocation: Can someone offer cryptographic proof of their location? This has applications for location-based authentication, criminal law, e-commerce, and integrating sensor data (see also: FOAM Maps).
Dynamic Social Choice with Changing Population: Can we extend Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem to situations where members of the group are changing (via birth, death, or immigration)? Can this social choice be dynamically consistent?
Decentralized NGDP targeting: Can non-fiat currencies implement NGDP targeting without a centralized authority? The extra currency could be considered Seigniorage that could subsidize public goods funding mechanisms.
Optimal Subsidy of Monopolies: Monopolies under-produce the goods they provide. The natural solution is to subsidize their sales. But what is the optimal subsidy? How can policymakers determine the optimal subsidy when the monopolist is incentivized to misreport marginal costs? What problems arise from difficulties in identifying monopolies?
Incentive-Compatible Public Debate: Debate styles like Oxford-style debate don’t incentivize people to honestly report their opinions before or after the debate, making it hard to know who won. Are there ways to incentivize honest revelation peoples opinions?
Social Epistemology: What’s the right way to update on evidence obtained through your social network? You probably shouldn’t update “all the way” given that the evidence might be filtered. Given knowledge of your source’s motivations, can you determine how true their statements are?
Language Model Preferences: Do language models exhibit consistent preferences? This is an important thing to know when considering the moral standing of neural networks.
Aligning Recommender Systems: A simple step towards AI alignment, can we build recommender systems that learn to satisfy our preferences without manipulating them?
Interconverting Neural Networks and Programs: Interpreting neural networks and verifying their properties would be a lot easier if we could convert them into readable code. Alternatively, compiling code into a neural network might speed up training or make it easier to run.
Neuromorphic Computing and Memristors: Memristors are a hypothesized 4th circuit component that complements inductors, capacitors, and resistors. There have been some implementations, but none are ready for deployment. What new circuits can we build? Could memristors enable true neuromorphic computing?
Solar Sail Materials: Cheap, lightweight, and robust solar sail reflectors are a key component of interstellar travel. What materials are optimal for this task? Could we design metamaterials that are lighter and more effective than a solid material?
Solar Sail Bussard Ramjet: the Bussard Ramjet is a neat idea, but the interstellar medium is likely too dilute for them to work in practice. Could providing additional acceleration with a solar sail allow them to overcome these limitations?
Programmable Droplets: Moving small droplets around on a chip electrostatic-ally is a more flexible route towards lab on a chip applications. It might also enable small-scale chemistry experiments.
Calcium-based Nitrogen Fixation: Elemental calcium reacts with nitrogen in air to produce calcium nitride, which reacts with water to form ammonia. Could this chemical looping synthesis be a cheaper way to produce fertilizer?
Silicon Dioxide Electrolysis: Can we electrolyze molten sand to produce high purity silicon for solar cells and semiconductors?
Methane Chlorination: We have an abundant supply of methane, but it is pretty chemically stable, making it difficult to react into complex products. Much research is invested into methane activation. One interesting approach is to use chlorine (something we can obtain from seawater) to produce chloromethane, which is more reactive. Can we perform this process cheaply and react chloromethane into complex products?
Plastic to Oil: Similar to trash gassification highlighted in the last post, converting plastics back into oil is one way to recycle atoms. This would make landfills an important resource.
Universal Atomic Force Field: Researchers use force fields to approximate the true motions of atoms for materials simulation and drug design. People have applied machine learning to this problem, but the scope remains limited. I want an AlphaFold-style effort to produce a force field that is fast, parallelizable, universal, differentiable, and accurate.
Inverse Materials Design Using Electron Density: Electron density is in theory sufficient to describe all properties of a material. Can we design materials with desired properties via gradient descent on the electron density?
Sonochemistry: Careful application of soundwaves can create transient, extremely high pressures and temperatures. Could we use this to perform high-pressure synthesis without reaction vessels designed for extreme conditions?
Lithium-air batteries: These could have roughly the energy density of gasoline, unlocking new applications in robotics, electric planes, drones, and shipping.
Superlenses: Metamaterials can be used to perform sub-wavelength imaging. Could we use this to more precisely pattern materials and make even better superlenses?
Implosion Fabrication and Expansion Microscopy: These are clever ideas involving the controlled swelling and shrinking of hydrogels to create densely patterned materials and image biological samples. Can we design polymers that more consistently change shape to a larger degree? Can we iteratively apply these techniques to obtain larger volume changes?
Fragment Screening and Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry: By screening molecular fragments for binding on a target, we can estimate which combinations likely bind a target well. Dynamic combinatorial chemistry allows us to directly combine these fragments to produce new molecules, evolving strong binding molecules directly. Can we compliment this with in silico approaches?
Diatoms for Microstructured Metal Oxides: Diatoms can create tiny, intricate structures out of silica. Is it possible for them to deposit other metal oxides? Copying the process might give us close to nanoscale precision over certain types of matter.
Small-molecule vaccines: A Fentanyl vaccine has been developed in rats. Using the immune system to counteract small molecules creates some interesting functionalities. Could use this to clear environmental toxins, counteract drugs, modify hormone levels, and target non-protein regions of pathogens.
Cholesterol Vaccines: Using the immune system to clear atherosclerosis or reduce cholesterol levels seems like a promising way to prevent cardiovascular disease, the #1 cause of death in the developed world.
Anti-evolution Drugs: Co-administering antibiotics with a drug that inhibits pathogen evolution could significantly slow or stop the development of antibiotic resistance.
Reverse Ribosomes: The central dogma of biology is that RNA gets converted into proteins, never the other way around. But most processes in biology are reversible, and there are many examples of proteins with inverted functionality. For example, transcriptase converts DNA into RNA, and reverse transcriptase converts RNA into DNA. Ribosomes carry out the process of translating mRNA strands into peptides, so is it possible to do the reverse? Reverse ribosomes would be a spectacular feat of engineering (and easily worth a Nobel prize). They would allow us to sequence proteins using high-throughput genomics, create self-replicating proteins, and employ directed evolution on proteins.
DNA Data Processing: New sequencing modalities like single cell sequencing and ticker tape DNA promise to generate massive amounts of data. But rather than read all the DNA into computer memory and process it, can we use the latent information processing capabilities of DNA directly? Simple DNA computing in-situ might report the most common sequences in a sample, summarize trends, or identify novel sequences.
Self-aggregating Proteins for Precision Fermentation: One problem with precision fermentation is the cost of separating out your desired protein from the growth media. Could we attach clotting proteins from the blood to our desired protein, aggregate them into a large blob, and cleave them out later?
Extremely Cheap Antibodies: Antibodies can be used to seek-and-destroy pathogens, immunoprecipitation of desired molecules, and medical tests. They act as a general search function for biotechnology. But all of these applications are limited by the high cost to produce monoclonal antibodies.
Recombinant Albumin: Making human albumin would allow more people to rejuvenate their blood (and slow aging) while artificial chicken albumin is a step towards artificial eggs.
C4 Rice: Rice and other important crops use a less efficient type of photosynthesis. Can we modify crops to be more efficient?
Blood Metagenomics: Can we sequence all of the DNA and RNA in a sample of blood to identify infections? See signs of cancer? Learn about our microbiome? Sequencing the nucleic acids in the blood could give researchers real-time detailed data on a persons health. At the population level, pathogen movement and evolution can be tracked by sampling people who volunteer as honeypots.
Anticipating Pathogen Evolution: Pathogens change surface proteins to improve binding or escape immune defenses. Can we predict and prepare for the kinds of changes a pathogen might make?
Rapid Tests for Pathogenicity: A pathogen-agnostic test for how bad an infection makes you feel can be used to domesticate diseases. By quarantining individuals with particularly virulent strains, the disease should evolve to be more harmless.
Iterated Meiotic Selection: This would allow for significantly faster iterated embryo selection.
Neural Augmentation: Human brain organoids can be transplanted into rats and participate in cognition. Could we perform a similar procedure in humans to increase intelligence?
Stent-electrode Recording Arrays: Putting electrodes on a stent is a less-invasive way to record and stimulate the brain. What are the limits of this technology? Could multiple stents be used to record different parts of the brain? Could techniques like fNIRS or fUS be performed inside the brain without interference from the skull?
Free-running Circadian Rhythm: Some people have a “free-running” circadian rhythm where they can choose to sleep at any time. Can we help other people escape the circadian prison?
Love Drugs: Can we improve peoples relationships with a daily pill? Should we? What about physical attraction? Should people pursue chemical friendships?
Multiplexed Drug Testing: Can we accelerate drug trials by trying several substances on each subject simultaneously? Changing the drug cocktail over time and using sophisticated data analysis might allow us to determine the effects of many drugs all at once.
Ultrasound Therapy and Diagnostics: Ultrasound can be used to activate brain regions, allow drugs across the blood-brain barrier, and visualize organs. Miniaturizing the technology and making it cheap offers a new level of control over our biology.
Personal Cooling Devices: Extreme heat is one side-effect of climate change which disproportionately affects developing countries. Extreme heat increases mortality, lowers productivity, and hurts test scores. Portable, battery-powered personal cooling devices might be cheaper and more efficient fix than A/C.
Health Effects of Saunas: There are some interesting correlations between sauna use and mortality. Could they help by inducing a temporary fever that kills pathogens? Could it trigger heat-shock proteins which perform protein clearing? How do they lower cardiovascular disease?
Depression, Chronic Illness, and Sleep: Sleep deprivation reduces depression symptoms and suppresses the immune system. Depression symptoms are similar to being chronically ill. Short sleepers have unusually low rates of depression. What are the relationships between sleep, the immune system, and depression? Could immuno-supression fix depression? Or sleep-reducing drugs?
Chronic Illness and Psychotherapy: Is there a relationship between immune system and brain that could explain chronic lyme, chronic fatigue, long COVID and other chronic illnesses? Mechanical back pain can be effectively treated with Sarno’s method, a form of psychotherapy. Given a connection between the nervous system and the immune system, could psychotheraputic methods treat these chronic illnesses? Finding a connection between the nervous system and cytokines might lend itself to effective pharmaceuticals as well.
Social Contagion of Mental Illness: To what degree does discussing mental illness lead to its spread? Could social media be causing an increase in mental illness?
Moral Bioenhancement: Could we modify ourselves to be more honest, open-minded, altruistic, and virtuous?
Edit 2/15: I added a few more research areas