Imagining…
Where Science Meets Creative Writing
Find a story within the topics above
How can we look at fossils and understand what creatures roamed the Earth millions of years ago?
How can we predict the behavior of materials deep within planetary interiors?
How can we reverse humanity’s impact on the global climate?
How can we predict habitats for life on other planets?
Doing impactful, innovative research requires training our brain to imagine the elusive unknown, even when bounded by scientific evidence. Now, more than ever in the history of human civilization, there is a pressing need to exercise our imagination muscles. Writing scientific fiction while accounting for the real science is a powerful way to do just that—to learn what is possible, what is probable, how we can change the future, and what our responsibility is to the future generation of our species.
Most Recent Stories
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Progress Without Morals
A scientist is trying to harness microbial properties to develop a fantastic tool. He believes he can; but should he?
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For Today’s Inspiration
- New Perspective of Home
Seen during Artemis II’s lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, the Moon and Earth align in the same frame, each partially illuminated by the Sun. The Moon’s surface appears in sharp detail in the foreground, while Earth sits much farther away, smaller and softly lit in the background. A faint reflection in the spacecraft window
- Earthset From the Lunar Far Side
The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission captured extraordinary images of our home planet during their journey around the far side of the Moon.
- Alaska’s Wildfires Heat the Planet, but Canada’s Cool It
Using 2 decades of satellite data, researchers learned that wildfires in North America don’t follow the same script: In western Canada, snow reflectivity drives a cooling effect, whereas in Alaska, permafrost burning leads to net warming.
- Distant Cousins? How Field Work on Earth Could Help Us to Better Understand Titan
What do Saturn’s moon Titan and the Earth have in common? Quite a lot as it turns out, from hydrocarbon deposits to polar clouds, lakes and rivers, craters and canyons, and more.
- Roaming gangs of tumor cells help spread cancer. Can drugs break them up?
To impede metastasis, researchers seek to develop novel treatments that disrupt tumor cell clusters
- The delicate dance of Earth and life | Science
We owe much of our existence to our planet’s rare features
- In This Issue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 14, April 2026. <br/>
- Satisfaction with democracy predicts democratic behaviors
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 14, April 2026. <br/>SignificanceTo diagnose a democracy’s health, it is common to survey citizens about their satisfaction with democracy. Whether attitudes thus measured are good predictors of objective democratic health, however, remains an important open question. We …
- The middle years of my life and career: balancing two experiments at once
Nature, Published online: 10 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00195-7When I found out that I was no longer eligible for an early-career grant, I took a moment to pause and reflect on my family life and my work.
- Homelessness of the heart
Nature, Published online: 10 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01063-0The past is a foreign country.