Contributions of Sydney Brenner, one of the recipients of theNobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2002, to the areaof molecular biology and genetics remain unparalleled. Heis undoubtedly the most famous South African biologist withcontribution to the central dogma (DNA to RNA to protein)of molecular biology, and for proving that non-overlappingtriplet codons specify amino acids in a peptide. He pioneeredthe use of molecular biology to understand animal development.Although inspired by T H Morgan and H J Muller,Brenner found eutelic organisms, with a fixed number of cellsin adult individuals, to be better models to understand howan entire organismcomes to be from a zygote. His selection ofCaenorhabditis elegans was so well thought out that it allowedhim not only to perform lineage analysis for each of the 959cells but also let White and Brenner draw the entire wiringdiagram for the nervous system of C. elegans, a feat not accomplishedfor any other animal so far. We intend this articleto summarize some of the key findings of Sydney Brenner’swork on C. elegans spanning two decades.

Organic synthesis is a creative science involving the constructionof molecules via chemical processes. Organic synthesishas the ability to produce new materials continuously, hence,bestow us with. The invention, discovery and developmentof new synthetic reactions, reagents and catalysts are collectivelyreferred to as synthetic technology/methodology or method-oriented synthesis. E J Corey formalized the concept of

‘retrosynthetic analysis’ for the total synthesis of a large numberof naturally occurring and bioactive molecules.

In this, and the next few articles, we will continue to explorethe social biology of the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidiamarginata through simple experiments. Since eachwasp colonyhas a single fertile queen and several sterile workers, andsince all or most wasps are capable of taking on both roles,the wasps have to decide who will be the queen and who willbe the worker/s. Such a decision has to be made both whennew colonies are being initiated as well as when an old queenin a mature colony has to be replaced by a new one. Here, Iwill describe a simple laboratory experiment that reveals thatin the context of new nest initiation, wasps decide who will bethe queen by fighting—the winner becomes the queen and theloser/s become the worker/s. The same experiment, in additionto revealing the proximate mechanism of the division ofreproductive and non-reproductive labour, also throws lighton the advantages of such division of labour.

The ITER project, a collaboration of 35 countries to buildthe first industrial-scale fusion energy facility, is progressingin the south of France. ITER components are manufacturedin factories around the world, then shipped to the ITER sitefor assembly and installation. Strong progress towards FirstPlasma in 2025 has been possible due in part to substantialachievements in research and development on fusion technologiesto support ITER’s demanding engineering specifications.India is a core contributor.

In the previous articles of this series, we have discussed thedevelopment of musical scales particularly that of the heptatonicscale which forms the basis of Western classical musictoday. In this last article, we take a look at the basic structureof scales used in Indian classical music and how differentragas are generated through the simple process of scaleshifting.

Getting all the possible term symbols for a given electronic configurationby listing all the microstates is a very tiring and attimes, boring job. In the present article, group theory has beenused to construct the atomic term symbols under the LS couplingscheme. It is shown that with the use of Young-tableau, gettingterm symbols become a Tetris brick game, where one needs toadd boxes of right shapes to get term-symbols.

Bj¨orner and Welker studied homology of k-equal partitionlattices and obtained interesting identities for (n − 1)!. In thisarticle, simple combinatorial proofs of these identities are discussed.