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
- NASA Study Finds Near-Earth Asteroid Is Actually Comet
New research led by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has revealed the identity of a puzzling near-Earth object by precisely tracking its motion through space and using powerful observatories that image faint celestial objects. This object has a dual personality: Past images hadn’t revealed obvious cometlike activity, suggesting it might be
- Young Galaxy Cluster
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope takes us 4.4 billion years in the past with this July 3, 2026, image of a young galaxy cluster, MACS J0553.4-3342. The cluster is composed of two actively merging sub-clusters, roughly equal in mass. Each sub-cluster is anchored on an immensely bright and massive elliptical galaxy, easily identifiable as the
- These “Clumped” Molecules Could Offer Clues About Earth’s Climate
Researchers investigated concentrations of clumped methane isotopes to learn more about how levels of the potent greenhouse gas have changed over the industrial era.
- For the Birds: Solar Panels over Peatlands May Increase Avian Biodiversity
A new study finds an unusual mix of bird species thriving in a German solar park built on degraded peatland.
- In This Issue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 28, July 2026. <br/>
- Provable cluster-preserving visualizations with curvature-based stochastic neighbor embeddings
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 28, July 2026. <br/>SignificanceWidely adopted Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (SNE) techniques like UMAP and tSNE have been used to make inferences in a range of scientific disciplines. Despite this, they are prone to producing visualizations that fragment underlying clusters …
- Will making ‘replication studies’ easier to find help science self-correct?
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02175-3Project on peer-review platform Pubpeer aims to make replication studies more visible.
- ‘Explosive diarrhoea’ outbreak grips US: how researchers are hunting its source
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02225-wCases have hit record levels, and scientists are racing to pinpoint where the Cyclospora parasite entered the food supply.