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The challenges fall into four general themes: promoting sustainable technologies, advancing human health, reducing vulnerability to threats and increasing the joy of living. The experts decided against focusing on detailed predictions or gadgetry, but instead identified 14 objectives that would benefit humanity and the planet.

The 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering, announced in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, are:

Making solar energy affordable: How do you convert and store the power of sunshine at a cost competitive with fossil fuels?

Providing energy from fusion: How do you sustain a controlled fusion reaction for commercial power generation?

Developing carbon sequestration methods: How do you capture the carbon dioxide produced from fossil-fuel burning, and confine that excess carbon underground?

Managing the nitrogen cycle: How do you develop countermeasures for fertilizer use, internal combustion and other activities that contribute to pollution?

Providing access to clean water: How do you address the short supply of water for personal use and irrigation in many areas of the world?

Restoring and improving urban infrastructure: How do you renew aging infrastructure while bringing cities into better ecological balance?

Advancing health informatics: How do you identify the specific factors behind wellness and illness, and follow through on the promise of personalized medicine?

Engineering better medicines: How do you find new treatments for age-old scourges as well as newly emerging diseases?

Reverse-engineering the brain: How do you unlock the secrets of brain function, to heal human diseases and advance the field of artificial intelligence?

Preventing nuclear terror: How do you head off threats from agents who are bent upon bringing ruin to industrial society?

Securing cyberspace: How do you protect the global information infrastructure from identity theft, viruses and other threats without bogging down the flow of data?

Enhancing virtual reality: How do you use computer technology to create imaginative environments for education and entertainment?

Advancing personalized learning: How do you move from a "one-size-fits-all" style of education to more engaging, computer-enhanced teaching techniques?

Engineering the tools for scientific discovery: How do you improve our methods for exploring the frontiers of life, the atom and the cosmos?

The committee decided not to rank the challenges. Instead, the academy is asking the public to vote for the most important challenge and provide comments at the project Web site. The site also offers an overview of the project, excerpts from interviews with committee members and other background information.

Engineering?s greatest challenge: Our survival - Innovation - MSNBC.com