Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci has been dead for almost 485 years, but theatergoers can still get to know the Renaissance man, thanks to "movement virtuoso" Daniel Stein and award-winning puppeteer Robert Smythe. Their first collaborative work, Measuring Man, uses Leonardo as inspiration for a performance that includes puppetry, movement and stand-up comedy and asks the question: "What does it take to risk something and then fail only to risk something again?" - an issue the artist faced thanks to the burden of his unfinished works.

BEIJING --Chinese authorities ordered theaters nationwide to stop showing The Da Vinci Code yesterday after Chinese Catholics warned that the film could threaten social stability. The film, based on the best-selling novel by Dan Brown, has long been criticized as insulting to the Catholic Church but has already earned more at the box office than any other film shown in China this year, and it was seen within the local industry as a contender to overtake Titanic as the highest-grossing film here in history.

LONDON -- A British High Court judge ruled yesterday that similarities between author Dan Brown's best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code, and an earlier nonfiction work did not constitute copyright infringement. Judge Peter Smith, pronouncing his verdict in the packed courtroom No. 61 in London's Royal Courts of Justice, dismissed the claim that Brown's novel "appropriated the architecture" and central theme of a 1982 work written by the plaintiffs. The three-week trial, which saw Brown take the witness stand, attracted huge publicity and at times became a real-life potboiler followed by readers and writers.

Painter. Scientist. Inventor. Designer. Engineer. Visionary. Genius. Has there ever been a man with more labels attached to his name than Leonardo da Vinci? Probably not. In a world where mere mortals struggle to master just one profession, da Vinci seemed to master them all. He painted "The Mona Lisa" more than 500 years ago, and it's still probably the most famous painting in the world. He was a key developer of the camera obscura, an early projection device whose descendants include the still camera.

A searcher after unfathomable things, a painter of disquieting smiles that suggest the riddles of human personality, and of hands that point to mysteries beyond the earth, he seemed to his contemporaries a sort of magician, and to men in later centuries an Italian Faust."

When screenwriter Akiva Goldsman sat down to adapt The Da Vinci Code, he was not thinking about how many copies of Dan Brown's book had been sold, or how many splashy headlines had been spawned by the controversy that surrounded it, or even how to deal with the Catholic Church's outrage at an allegedly blasphemous story. Instead, the writer says, he simply focused on the task at hand. "As I'm writing I'm thinking how to get in and out of the first act," Goldsman says. "With any adaptation, you sort of have to put your head down and do the work, and politics has to come second to doing your job."

It's a portrait of genius.In 15,000 square feet of paintings, drawings, artifacts, working models of extraordinary inventions, theatrical presentations and interactive displays, the Boston Museum of Science is presenting in its only American venue nothing less than the life and work of perhaps the greatest genius of Western civilization: Leonardo da Vinci, the original Renaissance Man.Somehow, 15,000 square feet doesn't seem sufficient.Called "Leonardo da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor, Artist," the show could just as logically have its title reversed.

It is widely viewed - more widely, of course, when the temperature hits 99 degrees - as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Without air conditioning, Houston would still be a cow town, glass skyscrapers wouldn't grace city skylines, and people like Marlene Kells and family would have no refuge from the oppressive heat and humidity that blanketed Baltimore this week. "We take turns going in that room," Kells said as she sat outside her rowhouse on South Hanover Street, drinking Pepsi on ice and pointing up to the droning window unit in her second-floor bedroom.

The Masons of Maryland will be so busy Saturday they'll probably have to take a break from plotting world domination. Surely they'll already have found somewhere to temporarily hide their collection of human skulls and satanic pentagrams. That's because the Freemasons, or Masons for short, are preparing to unlock the doors of their lodges on Saturday for a rare, statewide open house — in part to dispel some of the mythology that has risen around the group in novels, movies and conspiracy theories.

The da Vinci robotic technology allows doctors to perform more precise surgeries. The technique also enables patients to recover more quickly with fewer complications in many cases. The technique is used to perform many different types of surgeries. Dr. Gavin Henry, program director of the surgical residency at Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, uses it over traditional lobectomy surgery to treat patients with lung cancer. The hospital said Henry is poised to outpace every surgeon in Maryland in the use of robotic technology for this operation.