This is why I love magazines like Seed: they have all these great articles about what scientists are trying to do and they can provide this research with a context, and also point out what matters and what does not.  This is a great article about how the much-discussed “theory of everything” would be really cool, but that it might not be nearly as important as some people think, and in fact, might also be a lot less interesting than a theory that could account for complexity:

String theory, or some alternative to it, might indeed unify two great scientific frontiers, the very big and the very small?—?and that would be an immense intellectual triumph. But a third frontier, the very complex, is perhaps the most challenging of all.

In terms of scale, the most complex entities we know of?—?ourselves ?—?are midway between atoms and stars. It would take about as many human bodies to make up a star as there are atoms in each of us. Living things are very large compared to atoms: They must be big enough to have layer upon layer of intricate structure. But they cannot be too large, otherwise they would be crushed by gravity.

It may seem topsy-turvy, then, that astronomers can speak confidently about things billions of light-years away, whereas things on the seemingly more graspable human scale, such as theories of diet and child care, are notorious for their lack of consensual progress. But stars are simple. They’re so big and hot that their content is broken down into simple atoms; none matches the intricate structure of even an insect, let alone the human brain.