DINING DIGS |Construction work begins at the new Stanford Dining Facility at East Campus Dining Commons. The new dining hall—located in the former Toyon parking lot– will support about 450 students in Crothers, Crothers Memorial Hall and Toyon Hall. The East Campus Dining Commons is slated to open in late spring 2011.

BLACK HOLES | SLAC’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and a host of other research teams are featured in a paper today in Nature that traces the origin of super-massive black holes.

OH, THE SUMMER FIGHTS | Historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution takes a historical look at the spate of world violence that has broken out in late summer. “Maybe it is the effects of the heat, or the sense of urgency to do something before the cold of winter; but nonetheless, we’ve also seen a lot of late-summer violence the last few decades,” writes Hanson. Here’s to countries keeping their cool during these dog-days of summer.

BOWL CUT | ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit predicts the Stanford Cardinal has what it takes to go to the Rose Bowl this year.

iTUNES | Stanford’s getting in-tune with the latest class technology, according to Brent Izutsu, senior program manager for Stanford on iTunes U and YouTube. Izutsu says that Stanford has more than 3,200 iTunes files available and maintains about 1 million downloads monthly. The most popular program? A course in iPhone application programming. In the past months, Stanford joined a network of other schools in starting up a new iTunes U system.

CORAL GRIEF | In case you missed it, this issue of Stanford Magazine features the work of Steve Palumbi, director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, who is studying dying coral reefs near a tiny island in the South Pacific.