In today’s Globe science section is an article about the rapid spread of worms in New England soils and how the crawlers can have harmful effects in forest ecosystems. The article doesn’t give much hard evidence of these negative effects. So far, it’s just anecdotal reports that more worms are moving in quickly and beginning to have an impact, but researchers are beginning to take a closer look.

Yesterday’s front page story about the university building boom in the Boston area gives a snapshot of the new buildings we will see cropping up at Harvard, MIT, BU and other campuses in the next several years. The article quotes a former Northeastern president, also a historian of higher education, who says this could be the biggest expansion of universities since the 1960s. And this doesn’t include the construction at the various research hospitals (which we wrote about earlier this summer).

Finally, in an editorial today, Globe editors are putting their support behind plans to create the Massachusetts Life Science Collaborative, which would bring together the universities, research hospitals and biotech/pharma industries (see this article from last week) to encourage cooperation and to give the powerful life sciences enterprise in MA a single voice. The editorial says that maybe this kind of group is what we need to address issues that affect not just the life sciences, but all of us in the state: high cost of housing and real estate, poor public education in the sciences…