Photographer Amanda Means gave a public talk at the Harvard Museum of Natural History to explain her work. Watch the video…

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When you ask Douglas Starr, co-director of the Knight Center for Science Journalism, what difficulties he faces in writing his new non-fiction book about the early days of criminal forensics, he answers his main sources are all dead. “I wish I could pick up the phone and talk to them,” he says.

As far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t bring all of them back to life!

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In a two-room shanty on the railroads behind the Riverside T station, a television on the wall shouts out the latest Fox News announcements. While T-drivers take their break around two boxes filled with doughnuts, Joanne Butler prefers to pick on her new colleague.

“Did they allow you to shave your head and wear those shinny silver crosses?” she asks, pointing at the young man’s Michael Jordan earrings. “Did you sing rap music before you worked here?”

Teasing is a golden rule among T-drivers.

“We call [Joanne] “Half-Pint” because she’s only 5’3”,” says Tim, one of Butler’s colleague who declined to give his last name. But she never lets them go too far. “That woman, she’s a character,” he adds.

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Charles Wilson was born in Boston in 1985. When he turned six, Kory Darby entered his life. “We met in our neighborhood in Dorchester,” Wilson explains, rolling his goatee hair between his thumb and forefinger. They both went to West Roxbury High School. Darby, who is 24 today, started his undergrad at Roxbury Community College but dropped out of his business degree program two years ago. “He was only going there to eat lunch,” Wilson says. Their laughs resound in rhythm in the Suffolk Superior Courtroom 817. Wilson doesn’t want to start college for the moment. He says he thinks he is not ready.

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It starts with a white dot on the gum. You know, those annoying canker sores that itch in the mouth. In some countries, it only needs one week to get worse. A hard fever strikes you and if your immune defenses are too weak, it can destroy the hard and soft tissue of your mouth. When it is not treated in time, it perforates your cheek; and if you’re lucky, you’re not part of the 70% to 80% of the victims it kills. But as a survivor, most of the time, you stay disfigured forever.

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BY: Marybeth Kennealy, Phil Mattingly and Eva Zadeh

Long before the first shovel broke ground on Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel project, the largest public works project in U.S. history had money problems. Burying seven-and-a-half miles of highway under the city clearly would entail unprecedented costs, and officials were fearful of releasing a budget figure that was too high. Their number: $2.7 billion.

“The original estimate was fiction. It was political fiction,” said Massachusetts Senator Robert Havern, who served as the chairman of the Senate’s Joint Committee on Transportation during the Big Dig’s infancy, in an interview at his State House office. “I honestly don’t think anybody ever thought it was going to be $2.7 billion. I don’t think if it was estimated to be much higher that anybody would have done it.”

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There is a place in New York City where you can learn that a genital massage to orgasm was a standard treatment for female hysteria in the Western medical tradition of the 19th century. There, you discover how doctors, tired of giving orgasms with their fingers to calm their patients, invented electrical devices. Those first vibrators exposed behind a small display case intrigue and fascinate.

The Museum of Sex in New York is not a sex museum where you would see peep shows. It is dedicated to the exploration of the history, the evolution and the cultural significance of human sexuality. “Our mission is to educate, to entertain, and to enlighten the public,” public relations Noelle Daidone explains.

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