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

  • Curiosity Blog, Sols 5016–5021: Fantastic Minerals and How To Detect Them

    Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 18, 2026 Curiosity surprised us at the beginning of the week with a change in rock texture — instead of the finely layered bedrock blocks we’ve been seeing in our recent sulfate unit workspaces, suddenly we were looking

  • Help Overlap Zoo Reveal Cosmic Dust

    Galaxies, vast collections of billions of stars, gas, and dust held together by gravity, are scattered across the immensity of space. But every so often, a coincidence occurs: Two galaxies line up from our point of view on Earth (or from a space telescope) and appear to overlap in the sky. These rare overlapping galaxies

  • Where Fire Ends, Chemistry Begins

    Once smoke is generated, chemical reactions reshape its gaseous and particulate constituents, altering what travels downwind and what people, ecosystems, and the climate are exposed to.

  • The 6 August 2025 fatal Dayuan landslide in Guangzhou, China

    On 6 August 2025, the Dayuan landslide in Guangzhou, China killed 7 people. It was triggered by rainfall onto an area affected by a wildfire. In recent decades, China has built substantial capacity for investigating landslides. One result of this is that most significant landslides there are now analysed with the results published. This is

    • In This Issue

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 39, September 2026. <br/>

    • Dynamic attribute activation explains gaze biases in choice

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 39, September 2026. <br/>SignificanceEveryday decisions are shaped by where we direct our attention. Although a large body of research has documented robust links between attention and choice, we still lack a systematic understanding of why attention influences choice and when …

    • Osteoclasts intercept meningeal lymphatic paths for dural metastasis

      Nature, Published online: 30 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11082-6Osteoclast-derived angiopoietin-2 in the dura mater impairs lymphatic vessel function and weakens anti-tumour immunity against dural metastases, which offers new therapeutic approaches to restore meningeal lymphatic function through selective osteoclast targeting.

    • Human genetics implicates a BACH2–NRF2 axis in fetal haemoglobin activation

      Nature, Published online: 30 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11113-2BACH2 restrains activation of the fetal-haemoglobin-encoding γ-globin genes, while loss of BACH2 enhances NRF2 chromatin occupancy and promotes the formation of activation foci at the γ-globin genes.