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
- Fires Rage in Georgia
Firefighters are battling two destructive blazes in the southern part of the state as drought grips the U.S. Southeast.
- NASA Connects Little Red Dots with Chandra, Webb
A newly discovered object may be a key to unlocking the true nature of a mysterious class of sources that astronomers have found in the early universe in recent years. A “X-ray dot” found by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory could explain what the hundreds or potentially thousands of these objects are. A paper describing the
- Hydrothermal Heat Flow as a Window into Subsurface Arc Magmas
What can warm fluids in arc crust tell us about how much magma is lurking underground? Hydrothermal heat fluxes provide constraints on the supply of magma from the mantle in subduction zones.
- The Genesis Mission Needs Hydrology: Here’s How to Incorporate It
By positioning water security as one of the “most challenging problems of this century,” the Genesis Mission can become the sandbox in which AI reshapes how the United States measures, models, and manages water.
- Thousands of shady ads sell paper authorship for cash, large-scale investigation finds
Results are “only the tip of the iceberg” of shadowy paper-mill marketplace
- Octopus ‘krakens’ as large as semi-trucks stalked ancient seas
Giant cephalopods may have rivaled marine reptiles as apex predators during the age of the dinosaurs
- In This Issue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 16, April 2026. <br/>
- Sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics and Koopman operators with Shallow Recurrent Decoder Networks
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 16, April 2026. <br/>SignificanceWe present sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics with shallow recurrent decoders (SINDy-SHRED), which jointly solves the sensing, model reduction and model identification problem with simple implementation, efficient computation, and …
- Cephalopods deserve higher welfare standards in research
Nature, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01320-2These highly sentient creatures have weak protections for their well-being. That must change.
- Do octopus brains work like humans’ — or is there another way to be smart?
Nature, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01302-4Just like vertebrates, cephalopods — such as octopuses and squid — have elaborate brains. Neuroscientists are flocking to them for insights into how intelligence evolved.