Plus: Elon Musk reportedly ordered the recent Starlink slowdown in Ukraine. We wanted our last print edition of 2026 to include a slate of stories that check in on impossible ideas. Because it's fun to dream about living on other planets or uploading our brains. But also because scientists and engineers who won't give up on daring endeavors remind us what technology is supposed to do: make life better, safer, healthier, even more joyful. We explore bold attempts to make synthetic blood, build cities on the moon, and attain cognitive immortality . We investigate AI's ability to say no, a bionic eye that can restore sight, and high hopes for blended meat.

A new era of spaceflight could save astronauts time and cut exposure to cosmic radiation as they rocket to Mars--and beyond. Just before the Artemis II crew began its historic slingshot around the moon this past April, NASA announced plans to build Space Reactor-1 Freedom. SR-1, the first-ever nuclear-reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft, is meant to fly an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2028, arriving in 2029. A successful mission would herald a new era of more efficient, potentially faster spaceflight--saving astronauts time and cutting their exposure to harmful cosmic radiation as they travel to Mars and beyond. "You wake up to that announcement, and it puts a big smile on your face," says Simon Middleburgh, co-director of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales. Running a nuclear reactor in space may sound like lunacy, but it's not.

In unraveling the pathways by which movement helps the body, we could develop medicines that offer some of the same benefits, without the workout. We all know exercise is good for us. It builds muscle, strengthens bones, lowers blood pressure, and boosts mood. By deciphering how movement benefits the body, researchers hope to develop medicines that can offer some of the same perks--without the workout. The idea isn't to replace exercise but to bring its upsides to people who struggle with frailty, disability, or chronic illness. It will take a lot of experimentation to untangle the myriad pathways by which exercise promotes health.

Decoding how animals communicate could reveal the inner lives of other species--and give humans a window onto how they see the world. Humans are far from the only species with a gift for gab, and our furry, feathered, and finned friends could have a lot to tell us. Decoding how animals communicate with one another could offer a window into the inner lives of other species and help humans realize that "animals are sentient creatures who think, who have hopes and dreams of their own," says Con Slobodchikoff, the founder of Zoolingua, a company working on dog-to-human speech. Teasing all this out is complex. To decipher howls, squeaks, and clicks, researchers must match the creatures making sounds with what's happening around them. Prairie dogs, for example, utter a different series of yips when a coyote approaches than when a hawk is nearby.

Batteries that swap liquid electrolytes for solid materials promise to charge faster, last longer, and (crucially) run cooler. The rise of the lithium-ion battery, which powers everything from the smallest personal electronics to gargantuan energy storage systems, has been nothing short of revolutionary. But as anyone who's boarded a plane in the last decade could tell you, storing and pumping out energy by moving charged lithium ions through a liquid electrolyte soup has its drawbacks, not least that the batteries have a troubling tendency to catch fire. Enter the solid-state battery, which swaps liquid for a solid ceramic or polymer, creating power packs that charge faster, last longer, cram more energy into smaller spaces, and (crucially) run cooler. A new generation of companies aim to bring such batteries to market, and if their bets pan out, the tech could substantially ease the shift away from fossil fuels. Solid-state batteries have been "just a few years away" for more than a decade now.

Ridding the world of forever chemicals could address a range of health and environmental and health woes. PFAS or forever chemicals--could eliminate a list of woes for people and planet. Used for decades in everything from nonstick pans to firefighting foams, PFAS have been linked to increased risks of fertility challenges, developmental delays, cancer, and reduced immune response . They are known for a strong bond between carbon and fluorine, which the environment struggles to break down. PFAS are everywhere: They spew from factories and slough off products and into water with normal use. Scientists have found them in everything from human blood to Antarctic snow .

Deploying simple, proven methods for making our roads safer could save more than 1 million lives worldwide each year. Every year, traffic crashes kill more than one million people, and they're the leading cause of death for children and young adults. In the US, 100 people a day lose their lives this way, in many cases not on highways but on rural and local streets. "Traffic deaths are a leading cause of preventable death, yet we treat it like it's inevitable," says Leah Shahum, founder and director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit focused on making streets less deadly. The causes of a crash can be muddy. Drivers make mistakes like speeding or getting distracted, but infrastructure fails them too: Perhaps they were on a road built for speed and not safety, in a screen-filled vehicle, or at an intersection where pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars aren't visible.

It's all too easy to lose sight of ambition when we're busy playing whack-a-mole with the world's problems. I'd wager everyone has a rehearsed response to what's absolutely one of the world's worst interview questions: "What's your biggest weakness?" Whenever I've gotten it, I take a slow--even pensive--breath and rattle off my line: "I say no to myself too much." I'm a systems thinker: When an idea pops up, I immediately spin up a feasibility assessment in my head. I run lists, plot timelines, and tally budget line items. Sometimes a rough Gantt chart starts to take shape.

MIT engineers' design for a robot that both swims and flies could lead to a new class of vehicles for ocean exploration. Given that water is 1,000 times denser than air, moving through those two mediums requires very different mechanics--or so one might assume. Yet birds like gulls and puffins can plunge into the sea, swim underwater, and leap back into the air to fly away. And now engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can do likewise. The "flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle," or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is equipped with a central fuselage, two flexible wings, and a steerable tail. The body contains a battery and a waterproof electric motor that drives a crankshaft, which pumps the wings up and down at preset frequencies.

An MIT historian uncovers the true origins of an artifact once thought to be a relic of the Boston Tea Party. When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed at Old South Meeting House, he had no reason to doubt its story. Descendants of the Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label in 1987, saying it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. But after a year of research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later. The decisive clue came when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as previous scholars had done. He found that the characters had been used phonetically, in slightly variant forms across contemporary sources, to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that acquired Asian tea for shipment to American markets during the 1860s and 1870s.