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
- Crew-12 Launches
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev onboard, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. NASA’s
- NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 Launches to International Space Station
Four crew members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission launched at 5:15 a.m. EST Friday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for a science expedition aboard the International Space Station. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket propelled a Dragon spacecraft into orbit carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway,
- Creating Communities to Help Interdisciplinary Scientists Thrive
Solving complex challenges often requires diverse expertise, but skepticism remains within traditional academic institutions and mindsets regarding interdisciplinary science and scientists.
- A New Way to Measure Quartz Strength at High Pressure
Direct stress measurements inside deforming quartz reveal how its strength changes with temperature, improving models of continental crust deformation.
- 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 …
- Exclusive: Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation
Nature, Published online: 13 February 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00468-1Staff members have been instructed to scrub this topic and ‘biodefense’ from the agency’s website.
- ‘I was nearly arrested’: escaping Myanmar’s military leadership for a PhD abroad
Nature, Published online: 13 February 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00140-8In the shadow of ongoing conflict, physician May T. N. Noe forged a path to achieve her academic goals.