Finished! Photo via Boston Public Library.

Graduatin’ tomorrow, movin’ east next week. It’s as though I’ve come to the end of some sort of long, strenuous, athletic activity …

• Because it’s there? Dave Munger wonders why anyone would run a marathon.
• Convergent evolution—in two different directions. The extinct marsupial predators known as thylacines may have had dog-like skulls, but their elbows suggest they hunted like cats.
• Where frequency meets ill-preparedness. The regions where a particular kind of natural disaster causes the most damage are not always the regions where it occurs most often.
• All the fun of opinion polling, with nasal swabs. Recruiting participants for even a small epidemiological study is logistically tricky.
• After olives, the goddess Athena invented wheat-free ambrosia. The history of gluten-related health issues stretches from ancient Greece to your neighborhood Whole Foods.
• Fossilized. Raindrops. It may be possible to reconstruct the density of the ancient atmosphere by measuring fossilized raindrops.
• Next up, Am Nat? The ecology journal Oikos recently launched a blog featuring “armchair ecology” on topics from the value of (judicious) hand-waving arguments to lichinivorous moths.

Video of the week, from the BBC: a time-lapse simulation of fetal face formation. Watch as ontogeny (kinda, sorta, okay not really) recapitulates phylogeny.

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