Imagining Science

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

For Today’s Inspiration

  • NASA Conducts RS-25 Engine Test in Support of Future Artemis Missions

    NASA tested RS-25 engine No. 10001 on Oct. 21 on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Test teams fired the developmental engine for almost eight-and-a-half minutes (500 seconds), the same amount of time RS-25 engines fire during launch of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. During

  • NASA JPL Looks to Next 90 Years of Innovation, Exploration

    Interstellar probes. Lunar drones. Helicopters on Mars. When a group of Caltech graduate students and enthusiasts began conducting rocket-propulsion tests in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco on Oct. 31, 1936, they had no idea that their work marked the inception of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ninety years later, the lab, now managed by Caltech for NASA, isn’t

    • In This Issue

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 41, October 2026. <br/>

    • Interventions to mitigate post-infection morbidity: Management insights from simple models

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 41, October 2026. <br/>SignificanceMany infectious diseases cause morbidity after recovery. However, management typically focuses on acute burden. Moving beyond this, we use models to examine interactions between interventions and post-infection effects. We show that reductions …

    • Persistent neuronal stress signalling underlies Angelman syndrome phenotypes

      Nature, Published online: 21 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11165-4Genetic and proteomic analyses in human neurons and mouse models of Angelman syndrome (AS) show that loss of the ubiquitin ligase UBE3A leads to an overabundance of asparagine synthetase, and that this is linked with many AS phenotypes.

    • WEE1 opposes APC/CCDH1 activity to promote S phase entry

      Nature, Published online: 21 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11188-xExperimental and modelling data indicate that WEE1 promotes re-entry of quiescent cells into the cell cycle, potentially explaining the toxic side effects of WEE1 inhibitors in cancer therapies.