Every culture, tribe and religion seems to have its own story about the origins of life and of the universe itself. Today scientists hope to bridge the divides with a unifying story of their own.

The earth seems to have been built specifically with us—all of humankind—in mind.

An excerpt from The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Change the World presents very optimistic hopes of unifying humanity.

Wendy Freedman, director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, spoke to Vision about the complexities of measuring the universe and of the human brain that attempts to make sense of it.

As the UN pegs today as the date when human population passes 7 billion, we can expect increasingly strident calls to re-evaluate our planetary role.

Is the universe accidental—now pictured as a single bubble within a cosmic foam? Or is this just a choice of belief, not an empirical conclusion?

Scientists are turning the cosmos upside down in their search for a unifying Theory of Everything. But there’s one place most of them won’t look.

A Stanford symposium titled “Connecting the Dots” looks for connections between agriculture, energy and the environment as population grows.

In The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, journalist Charles Fishman reintroduces the reader to life’s most precious resource—water.

The United Nations has declared 2011 the International Year of Chemistry. While the world celebrates a century of scientific progress, we have to ask how our dreams of a synthetic utopia might end.

We can learn from our mistakes. Recognizing and correcting errors, and the sources of errors, can help us avoid future errors.

Little Manya Sklodowski (Marie Curie) became the first woman to earn the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the first person ever to earn a second Prize.

The worry that we will overstep our ability to control the use of our material knowledge has been a recurring literary theme.

Is preserving the species, or even the planet, the ultimate in human meaning? Vision looks at three recent books that outline potential end-time disasters.

We now know that the adolescent mind is as active as a baby’s when it comes to neural pruning in preparation for adult life; it is truly a work in progress.

The one-size-fits-all approach to education isn’t working. What’s needed is one that capitalizes on and nurtures each child’s strengths and creativity.

We explore several aspects of stem-cell research which have been discussed in recent publications and at two recent conferences held in San Francisco.

Vision asks Clive Svendsen of the Regenerative Medicine Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles about the current direction in stem-cell research.

What is it about human beings that makes us always want to push the limits? When it comes to the frontiers of medical science, is it possible to go too far? 

Vision discusses three books that examine why and how people hold beliefs about the meaning of life and the existence of God.