Today, a four-lane highway by bisects Walden Woods and there's a full landfill and a former gravel-mining site.

NPR: Soccer Fields Latest Threat to Thoreau's Woods

Bullard pointed to a primary geographical challenge: the Hindu Kush mountain range that bisects the country, roughly separating north from south.

WSJ: U.S. Sets Stage for Exodus from Afghanistan

An answer emerges during a foray into the vast Rift Valley, in a place where the road bisects two tribal regions.

CNN: Thousands remain displaced months after Kenyan violence

Yet this stretch of Singapore bisects an isthmus that is otherwise barely distinguishable from Nicaragua, a few hundred kilometres to the north-west.

ECONOMIST: The Panama Canal

The new East Passyunk Avenue, which diagonally bisects the otherwise strict street grid of South Philly, is dotted with boutiques, shops, cafes, restaurants and bars catering to newcomers in an old neighbourhood.

BBC: A new corridor in old South Philadelphia

At 3:15 in the morning, Jamie Powers and Kevin Thomas, environmental conservation officers for New York state, ease their 31-foot boat into the inky waters of Jamaica Bay, which bisects the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

FORBES

In 2012, the transport minister approved tunnelling underground a section of the A10 ring road that bisects Zuidas and there are also plans to enlarge and improve the Amsterdam Zuid train station, both to begin construction by 2015.

BBC: Living in: Amsterdam

Ozturk and her Turkish colleague, Dr. Ayhan Dede, have been studying the three species of dolphins commonly found in the Bosphorus, a 20-mile long channel which bisects Istanbul, a city of more than 10 million people, and runs from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara.

NPR: Dolphins Dodge Danger in the Bosphorus Strait

It rankles a bit to hear such a marvellous explanation of the forces that created the mid-Atlantic rift that bisects Iceland on the Thingvellir plain near Reykjavik, but no hint that Europe's first parliament, the foundation of one of the most prosperous and democratic societies on earth, met just over a thousand years ago on that exact same spot.

ECONOMIST: Island life