Around the Mall and beyond -- Phenomena, comment and notes -- Polar bears mingle with people on Manitoba's Cape Churchill -- Having all the answers is a hard row to hoe -- The secret hearts of flowers stand revealed in x rays -- Sybaritic to some, sinful to others, but how sweet it is! -- A meerkat volunteers to guard duty so its comrades can live in peace -- If interstellar hot line rings, who gets the message? -- Quantum physics' world: now you see it, now you don't -- Maidens of the sea can be alluring, but sailor, beware -- Gods and goddesses in graven images from old Hollywood -- Lizards that take to the desert like ducks to water -- Those strange goings and comings in the sock drawer at night -- When home sweet home was just a mailbox away -- The Silver Whistler -- A Tale of Two Bagels and other bits of execrable prose -- 'Gone up North, Gone out West, Gone!' -- The Death dive and brave rescue of the Squalus -- Fifty years on, 'O Best Beloved,' Kipling is making a comeback -- There'll be some changes in the city when the cranes come soaring in -- Secret of still waters -- By the atarnal, Yankee Jonathan! -- Was he half hype or sheer hero? -- 'Yours, not sitting on a pumpkin' -- The epic tale of one noonday meal, hot and on time -- 'Mules is born in a man; you ain't gonna get it out of him' -- Jacob Laurence: art as seen through a people's history -- 'Meryl is dying to do Scarlett anorexic' -- The controversy on whereabouts of Columbus' body -- Harmless, highly beneficial, bats still get a bum rap -- Eyeing animals eyeball to eyeball -- How to read Proust -- Archaeology with a heart in Holland's drained inland sea -- Stubbs' horses were all painted from inside out -- The first Olympics: competing 'for the greater glory of Zeus' -- 'The bass swam around the bass drum on the ocean floor' -- Camille Claudel's tempestuous life of art and passion -- India's intensifying dilemma: Can tigers and people coexist? -- Echoes and voices summoned from a half-hour in hell.