It may be too long, but I'd like exposing `mahalanobis` with a keyword argument for squaring. Here's what R does:

	Description:

	     Returns the squared Mahalanobis distance of all rows in ‘x’ and
	     the vector mu = ‘center’ with respect to Sigma = ‘cov’.  This is
	     (for vector ‘x’) defined as

	                      D^2 = (x - mu)' Sigma^-1 (x - mu)                 
	     
	Usage:

	     mahalanobis(x, center, cov, inverted = FALSE, ...)