The editors of Scientific American look to 2026 as a chance to peer into the future to see what science may be unfolding and what discoveries may lurk on the horizon. But the new year is also a chance to look back at recent turmoil and instability in federally funded scientific research, the wholesale dismissal of evidence in policymaking, and—in spite of these things—the perseverance of people working in the scientific enterprise. We celebrate the fact-checkers in the field of knowledge and you, our readers, who continue to trust us to bring you what’s real, what’s factual and what’s amazing in our world. Here are some of the topics we are paying attention to in 2026.
Nuclear Energy
The coming year in the U.S. will be pivotal in the renewed push to use more nuclear power. This drive results largely from the energy requirements of the artificial-intelligence boom. Demand for nuclear power has largely been flat in this century, eclipsed by interest in wind, solar and natural gas. Moves in Congress—notably, a 2024 law streamlining reactor licensing—and actions by both the Biden and Trump administrations to push exports and arrange financing aim to reverse the trend. Advanced technology demonstrations supported by the U.S. Department of Energy may start to come to fruition. But loosened export regulations and favored technologies raise questions about safety, nuclear waste disposal and the risks of nuclear proliferation. Projections of spiraling energy demand for AI drive the nuclear push, despite warnings of an AI bubble that might burst, dragging down the entire economy.
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In the meantime, the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 put nuclear weapons back in the world’s spotlight, returning an almost forgotten fear from the cold-war era to the geopolitical stage. The bombing killed Iran’s already faltering agreement to not develop enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, and such efforts are already showing signs of renewal. President Donald Trump has made garbled calls, walked back by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, to resume U.S. nuclear testing. The last time we tested nuclear weapons was in 1992. How these things play into the renewal of the weapons-limiting New START Treaty with Russia, which expires in February, will be one of the leading nuclear storylines of 2026.
Disaster Response
The Trump administration is trying to reduce the federal government’s responsibility for disaster response by downsizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency and shifting the burden to states and local jurisdictions. To that end, government officials have fired or suspended multiple FEMA staffers, including ones who signed a letter to Congress decrying the cuts. They’ve also tried to halt federal grants for disaster preparedness and declined disaster declarations and funding for some places.
Any major disaster in 2026 will be a real test—even FEMA has struggled to handle disasters on the scale we have recently had to confront, and small towns will suffer disproportionately without needed federal assistance. FEMA had only just started putting more emphasis on preparation and disaster prevention, which are infinitely less expensive than response.
Space
The moon continues to be a hot destination for both public and private space exploration. NASA’s Artemis II mission is set to launch as early as February, taking four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon in what would be the U.S.’s first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. In preparation for lunar landings later this decade, 2026 will see ongoing test flights of Space X’s Starship vehicle, not to mention Firefly Aerospace’s effort to deploy a lunar satellite for the European Space Agency and to deliver payloads to the far side of the moon.
Meanwhile NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch in autumn 2026. It will survey the cosmos for dark energy and dark matter while simultaneously honing its exoplanet-imaging skills.
Space exploration has truly become a global venture. We are watching efforts from India, China and Japan. China is set to launch Xuntian, a space telescope that will orbit with the country’s space station, Tiangong. India’s Gaganyaan orbital spacecraft is likely to conduct an uncrewed test mission in 2026. Japan’s Martian Moons eXploration mission will head to Phobos, one of Mars’s moons, to collect samples to bring back to Earth.
Health and Medicine
We will be watching how the U.S. responds to health crises when it is in the dark about public health data. Cuts and layoffs at our public health agencies are already making it harder to detect major problems—foodborne-illness outbreaks, rates of severe illness from infectious diseases, deaths from drug overdoses and biosecurity threats from abroad.
Will the U.S. lose its measles-elimination designation? Canada lost its designation in late 2025, and we’ll probably continue to see outbreaks of new and existing diseases such as COVID, whooping cough, bird flu and seasonal flu. With vaccination rates declining and trust in public health experts eroded by the current administration’s health leadership and deep cuts to our public health infrastructure, vaccine-preventable diseases that have been eliminated from the U.S. for decades could come roaring back.
This year could also bring breakthroughs in new therapies for autoimmune diseases, transplants and cancer. The 2025 Nobel Prize in medicine honored advances in regulatory T cell (Treg) therapy, and the first Treg-based therapy could be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for blood cancers as early as this year. There’s also ongoing progress in chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy and other immunotherapies for cancer, as well as in personalized cancer vaccines. We are curious about how lower drug pricing might affect the uptake of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy.
Conservation
The federal government is trying to change the definition of the word “harm” in the Endangered Species Act to make it refer directly and only to animals and not to their habitats. If this change succeeds, it could make it easier to log, mine and build on lands that endangered species inhabit and need to survive. At the same time, the administration is trying to remove protections for gray wolves and wants to roll back parts of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Since the act’s passing, not one marine mammal has gone extinct. We are watching to see how this situation might change.
In the meantime, misleading claims from Colossal Biosciences about reviving extinct species could harm conservation efforts. In 2025 the biotech company said it had “de-extincted” the dire wolf, and it has announced intentions to resurrect the thylacine (the Tasmanian tiger), the dodo and the flightless moa bird, not to mention its original claim to fame: an attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth. If people trust these pronouncements, they may question the necessity of protecting species that are currently imperiled at a time when public support for conservation is needed more than ever.
Artificial Intelligence and Technology
Will 2026 be the year the U.S. finally enacts comprehensive data-privacy laws? Technology companies are now stockpilers of global data, whether from wearable health-metric devices or smart-home voice recordings. State-by-state regulations will not be enough to manage users’ rights—the patchwork of laws will create too much confusion and too many loopholes.
It’s time for the American Privacy Rights Act, or similar legislation, to become the law of the land, and it’s time for holdouts in both major political parties to come together. This issue affects more than just consumers—responsible developers who do not opt to sell data on the global marketplace cannot compete easily with those who do. We need a law that sets clear limits on data collection, use and sharing. That law needs to have strong enforcement standards to challenge the powerful firms that will try to skirt their responsibilities. This law should also guarantee people the right to access, correct and delete their data. Other countries are taking this action. We should be, too.
Information Sciences
In 2026 we are expecting to see continued efforts to ban certain books. Since 2021 PEN America, which maintains an Index of School Book Bans, has counted more than 22,000 bans across 45 states. In an October 2025 interview, Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, told Publisher’s Weekly that states such as Oregon and Massachusetts have been successful in fighting censorship. But the strength needed to combat these bans comes from large organizations such as Authors Against Book Bans, EveryLibrary, the American Library Association and Penguin Random House, as well as PEN, who are all already attempting to offer “pre-emptive protection against book banning” in schools and libraries, Meehan said.
While books are being censored, writers across genres are facing an existential threat from artificial intelligence. AI systems have often used copyrighted material without compensating the creator—a practice being challenged in multiple lawsuits. In addition, the use of AI to create works of art is leading people to question societal definitions of what it means to be an artist or a creator. In a 2025 report entitled A.I. and the Writing Profession, ghostwriting agency Gotham Ghostwriters states that 61 percent of surveyed authors across the writing profession said they use AI, yet only 7 percent have published AI-generated text. Those numbers could shift dramatically as the technology, backed by billion-dollar companies, continues to spread into the realms of education and even research and to impact common organizational tools.