Walk down the halls of the Keck Center in Washington, D.C., home to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and you’ll find no shortage of brilliant conversations. Researchers discuss emerging discoveries. Scientists debate evidence. Experts gather around conference tables to tackle some of the world’s most complex challenges.
Tucked away among those offices is ours.
From the outside, it looks much like any other. A few desks. Whiteboards covered in ideas. Half-finished notebooks. Coffee cups that should have been washed yesterday. But spend ten minutes inside, and the conversation starts to sound a little different.
One afternoon we’re talking about whether a speedrunning marathon could be an unexpected place to reach millions of people with science. Another day we’re trying to figure out why a three-minute Instagram video connected with audiences in a way a much more polished production never did. Sometimes we’re sketching out ideas that feel so strange we laugh before anyone finishes the sentence. Other times we’re dissecting projects that didn’t work, trying to understand whether the problem was the platform, the storytelling, the timing, or the simple fact that not every experiment succeeds.
Those conversations have become one of our favorite parts of working at LabX.
Officially, LabX is the public engagement program of the National Academy of Sciences. We spend our time building projects that help people encounter science in places they might not expect to find it. That has led us to collaborate with musicians, YouTubers, game communities, artists, filmmakers, and scientists on projects that often look very different from what people imagine when they hear the words “science communication.”
But here’s something we’ve realized over the past few years: The most interesting part of our work usually isn’t the finished project.
It’s everything that happened before it existed.
Take Chemists in the Kitchen. To someone watching on YouTube, it looks like a fun cooking show where chemistry happens to play a starring role. What viewers don’t see is the months of conversations that came first. We debated recipes, not because we wanted to make good food television, but because we wanted to understand something much more fundamental: what makes someone accidentally learn science? Does curiosity begin with chemistry, or with wanting to know why bread rises, why caramel behaves the way it does, or why chocolate refuses to cooperate? We weren’t just developing a series. We were testing a hypothesis about how people engage with scientific ideas.
The same has been true for almost every project we’ve made. When we partnered with Games Done Quick, we weren’t simply placing science into a gaming event. We were asking ourselves what would happen if we met people where they already were instead of asking them to come to us. When Wrong Answers Only took shape, the question wasn’t whether comedians could explain science better than scientists. It was whether humor could create the kind of curiosity that makes people want to hear from scientists in the first place. Even projects that appear completely different on the surface often begin with the same question hidden underneath: how do you make science feel like something people want to spend time with rather than something they feel obligated to learn?
Those are the conversations we wish more people could hear.
Not because we think we’ve figured out science communication. Quite the opposite.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned at LabX, it’s that science communication is wonderfully, frustratingly unsolved. Every new platform changes the rules. Every audience brings different expectations. Every collaboration teaches us something we didn’t know before. Sometimes an idea works for reasons we never anticipated. Sometimes a project we’ve poured months into quietly disappears. Both outcomes are valuable if we’re willing to ask why.
And that’s why we’re here.
This publication isn’t meant to be another place where we announce new projects or recap events. Instead, we want it to be a window into the thinking behind our work. Over the coming months, we’ll revisit many of the projects we’ve mentioned here—not to celebrate them, but to examine them honestly. We’ll share the conversations that shaped them, the assumptions that proved wrong, the creative decisions that kept us awake at night, and the lessons we’ve carried into whatever came next.
Some essays will be about projects that exceeded every expectation. Others will be about ideas that quietly failed. We’ll write about creators who changed the way we think about engagement, scientists who challenged our assumptions, and moments that reminded us that communicating science is every bit as creative—and every bit as uncertain—as the scientific process itself.
We’re writing this as much for ourselves as for anyone else. One of the privileges of working at LabX is that every project leaves us with new questions, and this feels like the right place to explore them openly.
So if you’ve ever wondered why one science video reaches millions while another never finds an audience, how unlikely collaborations come together, or what it’s like to spend your days trying to convince people that science belongs everywhere from music videos to gaming events, we hope you’ll join us.
Welcome to our little office at the Keck Center. We’ve been looking forward to opening the door.