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

  • Eyeing the Richat Structure

    The circular geologic feature in northwestern Africa can be hard to recognize from the ground, but it is obvious when viewed from space.

  • I Am Artemis: Rebekah Tolatovicz

    Listen to this audio excerpt from Rebekah Tolatovicz, a mechanical technician lead supporting the Orion spacecraft’s main contractor Lockheed Martin: At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, there is a fleet of Orion spacecraft in work, and Rebekah Tolatovicz’s hands have helped build each one. Tolatovicz works to build, integrate, and test the spacecraft used

  • On the growth of research in landslides

    Since 1994 there has been a 32 times increase in the number of research outputs with the keyword “landslide”. In a couple of weeks time, I have the pleasure of being one of the invited speakers at the Landslide Risk and Geoengineering (LaRGE) Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand. Ahead of that presentation, I’ve been using

  • Cleanup of Battery Recycling Sites May Lower Childhood Lead Exposure

    Unsound recycling of lead-acid batteries pollutes the soil around houses and agriculture fields in developing countries. Soil remediation might help in lowering the blood lead levels of children.

  • In This Issue

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 15, April 2026. <br/>

  • Energetics of biomolecular shells in core–shell nanocomplexes

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 15, April 2026. <br/>SignificanceThe drug delivery efficiency of engineered nanocarriers depends critically on their stability in biological media. Here, we introduce the stabilization enthalpy concept to describe experimentally determined thermodynamic stability relations of …

  • Venus’s impenetrable haze could be made of cosmic dust

    Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01212-5Modelling suggests that the layer beneath the planet’s acidic clouds is comprised of particles from outer space.

  • Composable neural emulators accelerate thermoelectric generator design

    Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10223-1A composable neural network emulator is described for speeding up thermoelectric generator design, demonstrating the ability to predict generator performance with >99% accuracy while taking only 0.01% of the time compared with commercial finite-element solvers.