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

  • How NASA’s Artemis III Lander Test Will Pave Way for Moon Landings

    Before Artemis astronauts land on the Moon’s surface in 2028, NASA will conduct the Artemis III demonstration mission in 2027, allowing teams on Earth and in orbit to practice rendezvous and docking operations between commercial human landing systems and the Orion spacecraft. Data from that mission, along with future uncrewed demonstration missions at the Moon,

  • Anil Menon Launches to Space Station

    NASA astronaut candidate Anna Menon and her children watch as a Soyuz rocket launches to the International Space Station with NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, Tuesday, July 14, 2026, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The trio lifted off for the Soyuz MS-29 mission at 7:47 p.m. local

    • 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 …

    • Relapse

      Nature, Published online: 15 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02133-zRestore previous version?

    • Improvements in educational opportunities go hand in hand with innovation

      Nature, Published online: 15 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02016-3The first longitudinal regional atlas of intergenerational educational mobility shows that the subnational regions of Europe in which individuals’ educational opportunities are least dependent on the educational background of their parents tend to have the most innovation, as shown by the number of patents.