2025 Prompts

Astronomy

To advance human civilization to other planets, it’s crucial to gather accurate data on planetary systems. Since stars play a significant role in solar systems, gathering accurate information about them is essential. Thus, we often use star clusters as a controlled environment to study stars more effectively. However, star clusters are currently classified based on observational data such as size, age, and density. How can the classification methods of star clusters be improved in order to gain a deeper understanding of their life cycles and their role in galactic evolution?  What additional observations need to be collected for an improved classification method? How can we classify star clusters to draw useful conclusions from each classification category?

Engineering

More and more cities around the world are becoming urbanized. However, a growing population means excess strain on the municipal infrastructure; this leads to a higher cost of living and worse quality of life. Thus, many cities have started expanding underground in order to meet the increasing demand for space. How can a suburban area expecting rapid urbanization utilize underground space to better the quality of life for the residents? Which services or components of the city should be moved underground? How can the underground and overground components of the city have seamless integration with one another? What sort of a city plan for constructing underground spaces in an urbanizing suburb is efficient, cost-effective and safe?

Life Sciences

There are approximately 12,000 new cases of cerebral palsy annually. Furthermore, 80-90% of the individuals diagnosed with CP struggle with daily activities that require the use of fine motor skills such as eating, brushing, etc. Although there are many assistive technologies for individuals with CP, they are too task-specific. This is often inconvenient and makes it difficult for individuals to be independent. What kind of assistive technology can allow individuals with CP perform the wide range of movements needed for everyday life? What can be done to make this device versatile, discreet and easy to use?

More coming soon!