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
- Notes from the Field
Looking at Chlorophyll from Space By Compton “Jim” Tucker NASA scientists are able to study plants from space, but this wasn’t always the case. “I love using satellite data to study the Earth,” says Dr. Compton “Jim” Tucker. When Tucker was a graduate student, he and some friends discovered a new way to study photosynthesis.
- 42 Years of Measuring the Sun, the Earth and the Energy in Between
By Denise Lineberry On Jan. 31, 1958, Explorer 1 became the first satellite launched by the United States. Its primary science instrument, a cosmic ray detector, was designed to measure the radiation environment in Earth orbit. Though its final transmission was in May 1958, it continued to revolve around Earth more than 58,000 times. As
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- 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 …
- Ancestry and somatic profile indicate acral melanoma origin and prognosis
Nature, Published online: 18 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09967-zAnalysis of the somatic and transcriptomic profile of 123 acral melanoma samples from Mexican patients helps understand tumour origins and prognosis, and highlights the importance of including samples from diverse ancestries in cancer genomics studies.
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Nature, Published online: 18 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10117-2A cold-injection method based on pseudo-emulsion enables scalable synthesis of stable, pure-green perovskite nanocrystals with near-unity photoluminescence quantum yield, achieved through defect-suppressing slow polybromide plumbate assembly at cold temperatures.