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
- NASA Moon Mission Spacesuit Nears Milestone
The next-generation spacesuit for NASA’s Artemis III mission continues to advance by passing a contractor-led technical review, as the agency prepares to send humans to the Moon’s South Pole for the first time. Testing is also underway for the new suits, built by Axiom Space, with NASA astronauts and spacesuit engineers recently simulating surface operations and tasks
- Shimmering Light in Egg Nebula
This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope released on Feb. 10, 2026, reveals a dramatic interplay of light and shadow in the Egg Nebula, sculpted by freshly ejected stardust. Located approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Egg Nebula features a central star obscured by a dense cloud of dust — like a “yolk” nestled
- Oozing Gas Could Be Making Stripes in Mercury’s Craters
Scientists are using new computational tools to analyze troves of old spacecraft data to better understand one of Mercury’s unsolved mysteries.
- Sediments Offer an Extended History of Fast Ice
Scientists used sediments to create a millennia-long archive of Antarctic fast ice. Along the way, they discovered that the freezing and thawing of this enigmatic ice appear to be linked to solar cycles.
- Can science build a better working dog?
New approaches could put talented canines into the hands of more people with disabilities
- Politics and war complicate global effort to study changes to Earth’s poles
As preparations for the fifth International Polar Year kick off, organizers grapple with U.S. climate skepticism and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
- How earthquakes organize stress
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 6, February 2026. <br/>SignificanceEarthquakes organize the stress in the crust by redistributing it through slip events. As a result, fault systems evolve to preferred, reproducible states as evidenced by natural experiments that measure statistical distributions of stress …
- Universal relation between spectral and wavefunction properties at criticality
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 6, February 2026. <br/>SignificanceAn important role in physics research is to uncover universal properties of various systems with different microscopic descriptions. Examples of microscopic models that exhibit paradigmatic properties are those that describe chaotic quantum …
- Exercise rewires the brain — boosting the body’s endurance
Nature, Published online: 12 February 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00414-1The more mice exercise, the more connections form between some neurons in their brains, study finds.
- The ‘astounding’ rise of semaglutide — and what’s next for weight-loss drugs
Nature, Published online: 12 February 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00228-1A single class of drugs is changing how people think about weight, health and medicine.