Atomic Fellowship. $60k for science and engineering projects.
How breakthroughs are achieved is exploratory in nature - it’s by going into the depths of a field and stumbling upon a problem that hasn’t been widely articulated yet. The theory of relativity emerged from Einstein reading the fine print in Maxwell’s work. But breakthroughs are happening less and less in academia.
The AI revolution happened with a “small group of motivated scientists and engineers who explored”. A small group of highly motivated people can discover what the biggest institutions will miss.
There are many more things to be done: in robotics, physics, biology, and maybe some computer science.
The fellowship provides up to $60k in funding to support experimentation - equipment, materials, collaborators, and the time to test hypotheses properly. This could start as fixing a computer architecture loophole you noticed, making a new search engine, building a flight controller, or running physics simulations to find new materials.
In the past, some Atomic fellows have later turned their work into companies.