There’s no grand plan and no reason why nature shouldn’t, like the rest of us, occasionally make terrible mistakes.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, a virtually unknown German country doctor called Robert Koch stood before the Physiological Society of Berlin and announced that he had…

In <i>The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy</i>, the Deep Thought computer announced that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything was 42.…