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
- APOD: 2026 November 5 – Enceladus in Silhouette
APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 November 5 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Enceladus in Silhouette
- Cyprus: Island of Snakes, Cats, and Ophiolites
The third-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea exposes an ancient piece of the ocean floor and hosts a clowder of cats.
- Sentinel images of the source of the 11 October 2026 landslide and debris flow along the Budhi Gandaki River in Nepal
Sentinel satellite imagery shows that the Budhi Gandaki event was another example of the failure of a steep rock slope that transitioned into a rock avalanche and then a debris flow. Almost a month ago, a less well reported but significant debris flow swept down the Budhi Gandaki river in Nepal, causing extensive damage. I
- How Science and the Environment Fared in the 2026 U.S. Midterms
Science was on the ballot across the United States in Tuesday’s midterm elections. On federal, state, and municipal levels, hundreds of people with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine ran for office. Americans also voted on measures related to conservation projects, pollutant abatement, healthcare access, and environmental reviews.
- In This Issue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 44, November 2026. <br/>
- Origami state machine with time-varying magnetic fields
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 44, November 2026. <br/>SignificanceMultistable mechanical systems can encode information and functionality through transitions between discrete states. A key challenge consists of reliably programming such systems to a target state without prior knowledge of the current state. …
- Twist-angle-dependent quantum phase diagrams in moiré bilayer MoTe2
Nature, Published online: 04 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11274-0Twist-angle-dependent studies of moiré bilayer MoTe2 reveal a transition from fractional topological states to correlated insulators and superconductivity, linking topology, symmetry breaking and magnetism in moiré quantum materials.
- Microbiome-wide PheWAS links gut microbial SNVs to health and exposures
Nature, Published online: 04 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11220-0Gut microbial single-nucleotide variants across 10,781 individuals reveal 940 associations that link strain-level genetic variation to 69 host traits, with structural analyses pinpointing host phenotype-associated variants, providing a base pair-resolution resource for mechanistic hypothesis generation.