Wes Phillips

The idea is simple: Stand in one place in a great city and look all around you. The cities I know here look pretty good, I think. Not much besides the "wow" factor, but that's a pretty big "wow."

Baldasare Forestiere created an underground dwelling that included a network of 100 niches, courts, patios, and passageways, including plantings of trees such as Strawberry, Carob, Jujube, citrus (sometimes multiple graftings on single trunks), Pomegranate, Mulberry, Date Palm, Avocado, Quince, and Persimmon.

Has Toxoplasma gondii affected human culture? Maybe so, claims Kevin Lafferty. Toxoplasma guru Karl Zimmer points us toward Lafferty's just published paper and tells us what to look for.

You call those dark ages?

Donald M. Murray died on Saturday, December 30. On Friday, he filed his last column. The Boston Globe ran his final column today.

Next, we have this article, submitted by Jonathan Scull, which says the lectures rail against "passive noise pollution"—that Daniel Barenboim claims we are too frequently forced to hear music over which we have no control and, thus, we listen too infrequently to music we have actually chosen.

Bagheera gets rude.