Public meetings this week look at making a neighborhood in Alewife; bike lanes through Porter; school district budgeting; a Net Zero Action Plan update; solutions in helping the unhoused; permitting for Starlight Square and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology food kiosk; and more.

Despite their name, the intelligent and resourceful blue jay does not have any blue pigment in its feathers – what we see is actually blue light refracted back to our eyes because of the unusual structure of its feathers.

We all know about the plastic pollution problem – we’ve seen the pictures of sea animals with plastics stuck to them and the documentaries that make this problem seem impossible to solve. Passing the Better Bottle Bill would be step in the right direction.

Sure, our calendars are filled with increasingly commodified holidays, but they’re also filling up with new days of nationwide significance.

Each Eastern gray squirrel has its own territory for food, nesting and raising youngsters. Squirrels are a tolerant species whose territories may overlap; they can eat and forage near each other without becoming aggressive.

Public meetings this week look at problems with rats and a change in preschool hours, missing a May 1 deadline on bike lane construction, turning a vacant lot in The Port into affordable homes, special education policies, an energy-use disclosure law, Alewife-area lab moratorium, city manager search, law against wage theft and much more.

House sparrows have lived happily for thousands of years in Europe and Asia; it was when people brought house sparrows to the United States to help against insect pests that the conflict began, and all because of a misunderstanding.

Public meetings this week look at bike lanes and off-street parking, a Net Zero Action Plan update, IQHQ’s life-sciences campus near Alewife, the search for a new city manager, using millions in American Rescue Plan funds, landmarking the Maria Baldwin House and much more.

Who has not been dazzled as they walk along some shallow watery shore by the sight of a 4-foot-tall great blue heron standing almost motionless? We have many that make their home here in Cambridge, and they are fascinating to observe.

For the musical theater production “Ocean Filibuster,” composer Sxip Shirey crafts emotional equations that stem from grief over the environment and seek to correct the “total failure of a species.”