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 Announces X-70 Experimental Aircraft to Advance Flight Research 

    On Wednesday, NASA unveiled its newest experimental aircraft, the X-70 Fractal, during the UP.Summit at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This high-performance, highly adaptable research platform is designed to accelerate the development and testing of advanced aviation technologies.  The crewed X-70 features advanced, rapidly reconfigurable flight-control technology that will allow NASA to explore

  • NASA Shares Plans to Accelerate Artemis, Return to Moon

    In an update on Oct. 23, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and other agency leaders shared the agency’s path to returning Americans to the lunar surface in 2028. Agency leadership provided updates on the previously announced acceleration plans for the Artemis program, advancing toward the agency’s Artemis III test flight in 2027 and Artemis IV Moon

  • 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.

  • Deltas Retain 28% of Global River Sediment, the Rest Enters the Ocean

    Rivers transport sediment to the coast, but how much get offshore is a mystery. A new study shows that deltas retain 28% of the global riverine sediment discharge with most trapped in large deltas.

    • 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.