This is the story of an outstanding plant geneticist who wasdetermined to use modern science to rescue the starving citizensof his motherland from a series of frequent and severefamines but tragically fell prey to terrible socio-politicalchanges that eventually made himdie of starvation in a prison.This plant geneticist is Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, who madenumerous, far-reaching, original contributions to basic andapplied fields of genetics and agriculture. Some of his majorcontributions are the establishment of the largest seed bankin the world of his time, the idea of ‘homologous series inhereditary variations’, and the concepts of ‘centres of originof cultivated plants’ and of ‘genetic erosion’.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2019 was awardedjointly toWilliam G. Kaelin Jr. of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe of Francis Crick Institute and University of Oxford and Gregg L. Semenza of Johns Hopkins University for their discovery of how cells sense and respond to varying oxygen levels.

The Chemistry 2019 Laureates - The Quest for Excellence

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 was awarded by the RoyalSwedish Academy of Sciences jointly to James Peebles fromPrinceton University, USA, and Michel Mayor from the Universityof Geneva, Switzerland, and Didier Queloz, also fromthe University of Geneva and University of Cambridge, UK,

“for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of theUniverse and Earth’s place in the cosmos”. One half of thePrize was awarded to James Peebles for “theoretical discoveriesin physical cosmology” and the other half jointly to MichelMayor and Didier Queloz for “the discovery of an exoplanetorbiting a solar-type star”. These are related to some of themost fundamental questions, namely the structure, constitutionand evolution of the Universe and the formation of planetsand the origin of life itself.

Continuing to explore the intriguing world of the Indian paperwasp Ropalidia marginata, here we will focus on their fighting behaviour. When wasps fight, there is, as expected, a winner and a loser. The winner is said to have shown dominance behaviour, and the loser is said to have shown subordinate behaviour. What is the function of such dominance subordinate behaviour? We saw in the 7th article in this series [1] that in the context of founding new nests, wasps fight to decide who would be the queen and who would be the worker. We then saw in the 8th article in this series [2] thatwhen wasps have to decide who would be their next queenin a mature colony, they do not decide by fighting, although they fight for other reasons. We will see in this article that workers continue to show dominance-subordinate behaviour in mature colonies. What is the function of this aggression displayed by the workers? In this article, I will describe two simple experiments that help us answer this question, and show that the function of wasp aggression can be quite different in different contexts.

The second article of the series on mega projects presents FAIR prospects for seamless experimentation across the nuclear landscape, and more; FAIR offers facilities to explore exotic plasma, nuclei and materials!

Details of the scientific programme, technological challenges, present status and future plans of FAIR are presented. India’s role as the third largest contributing country in FAIR GmbH is highlighted. Outreach activities and avenues to workin FAIR are discussed in detail.

Fermi energy, which is a theoretical concept, has been explored in an experiment for a copper wire in a Laboratory Course of Engineering Physics [1]. In this article, the scientific validity of this experiment is discussed and a method to determine Fermi energy is discussed.

Each rope burns from one end to the other in exactly onehour, but at an uneven rate. Which fractions of an hourare measureable by burning several ropes from one or bothends?