Today's Globe: scar-free surgery, flu find, Allston water, ocean-pollution alarm, cancer surgeon's connection, sex and cancer

Surgeons like to say that "to cut is to cure." But "natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery" - NOTES for short - does not involve cutting the skin at all. In NOTES, doctors access patients' insides through the mouth or other orifices, while looking through a camera at the end of the tube.

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered new details about how the avian flu virus interacts with the human respiratory tract - research that could lead to better methods for monitoring the virus and even drugs to stop it in its tracks if it acquires the ability to infect large numbers of people, according to a federal scientist not involved in the research.

As Harvard begins its expansion on the Allston side of the Charles, there is a push to return the area to its more watery natural state - part of an emerging national movement that touts the environmental benefits of landscape restoration.

The first gift the whales gave Roger Payne (left) was their song, which he in turn spread to the ears of the world. He's planning to do the same with their final gift to him, the data locked inside the skin and blubber samples he gathered from 986 sperm whales on a 5 1/2-year, round-the-world journey. Sitting inside those biopsy samples is the first overall baseline assessment of pollution in the world's oceans. "What we've analyzed so far," Payne said, "is shocking. It's well beyond any degree of pollutants that I thought would exist."

Also in Health|Science, could you tell from a photo if you're looking at a sunrise or a sunset and should you eat protein after lifting weights?

In Living|Arts, Dr. Jane Mendez, a breast cancer surgeon at Boston Medical Center, reaches out to those most in need.

On the op-ed page, conversations about sex and intimacy within the healthcare setting are similarly absent for many cancer patients at every step, from diagnosis through long-term survivorship, write Sharon L. Bober of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Elyse R. Park of Harvard Medical School.