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

  • October’s Night Sky Notes: Let’s Go, LIGO!

    by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific September 2025 marks ten years since the first direct detection of gravitational waves as predicted by Albert Einstein’s 1916 theory of General Relativity. These invisible ripples in space were first directly detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Traveling at the speed of light

  • NASA, Blue Origin Invite Media to Attend Mars Mission Launch

    NASA and Blue Origin are reopening media accreditation for the launch of the agency’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission. The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft will study the solar wind’s interaction with Mars, providing insight into the planet’s real-time response to space weather and how solar activity drives atmospheric escape. This will be

  • Safety Device Supplies Life-Saving Air in an Avalanche

    An Alpine medical team buried 24 volunteers in a mountain pass. Their study confirmed the efficacy of the Safeback SBX, which uses snow’s natural porosity to supply air to buried avalanche victims.

  • The 4 November 2025 landslide at Mae Moh Mine in Thailand

    A landslide in coal waste covering about a square kilometre was triggered by heavy rainfall. At about 4 am on 4 November 2025, a very large landslide occurred in a coal waste pile at the Mae Moh Mine in Thailand. This is an extremely large coal mining site that is co-located with electricity generating plants.

  • In This Issue

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 122, Issue 44, November 2025. <br/>

  • Revealing emergent human-like conceptual representations from language prediction

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 122, Issue 44, November 2025. <br/>SignificanceLarge language models (LLMs) show intriguing human-like behaviors despite being trained solely via language prediction. Are these models developing human-like concepts central to human understanding? Here, we demonstrate that LLMs can flexibly …