For centuries, scientists viewed the brain as one unified organ. A new Stanford Medicine study published in Nature Neuroscience on 18 September by lead authors Rayyan Jokhai and Carolyn Dundes overturns that idea. It shows that what we call the brain is really two ancient nervous systems joined together. The front part, which includes the forebrain and midbrain, comes from one type of starter cell. The back part, the hindbrain, comes from an entirely different starter cell. These two cell groups never mix.

LAST week, on 4th September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another. It is an attempt to correct the view of the world that comes from the widely used world map based on the Mercator Projection, the work of Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century Flemish cartographer. The problem with the Mercator Map is well known; for example, it shows the island of Greenland as the same size as the African continent, even though Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland!

NATIONAL Space Day was observed in India on 23 August commemorating the historic successful soft landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the south polar region of the Moon. The Moon landing in 2023, the fourth ever by any nation, marked a big leap in India’s space journey.

IN June 2026, The Nature Index, one of the most well-regarded barometers of high-quality research, issued the annual Research Leaders rankings. It made the academic community sit up and take note. Harvard University slid from first place to third for the first time in 10 years, behind China's Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Chinese institutions now occupy nine of the top 10 overall slots. This would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.

THE Cockroach Janata Party may have started as a satirical takeoff on Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s unfortunate remarks of May 15th this year on unemployed youth. But in a few months, it has transformed the national political space in a way that we could never have imagined a few months back. A witty response from Dipke to the Chief Justice’s remarks the next day, "What if all cockroaches come together?" drew a huge response.