Imagining Science

Imagining…

Where Science Meets Creative Writing

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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 Sees Martian Sulfur Up Close

    This close-up view shows fragments of sulfur crystals — the first ever seen on the Red Planet. The crystals were found after NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover happened to drive over a rock and crush it on May 30, 2024. Several days later, Curiosity used a camera on the end of its robotic arm to take

  • NASA Scientists Take to Air and Space to Study Arctic Sea Ice

    This month, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California are testing a spacecraft sensor that will help measure how quickly Arctic sea ice is disappearing. And while that instrument won’t launch for another year, scientists started preparing for its use during a recent field campaign in the Canadian wilderness. Researchers spent two weeks

    • In This Issue

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 27, July 2026. <br/>

    • Improving cell-free metabolism through direct integration of artificial respiratory chains

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 27, July 2026. <br/>SignificanceA key goal of bottom–up synthetic biology is to construct cell-free systems with life-like, autonomous, and self-sustaining capabilities. Achieving this requires an efficient and controllable energy supply. In this work, we integrate a custom-…