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By Soo Bin Park of Nature magazineSeoul, South KoreaThe South Korean health ministry announced last month that research into stem cells and regenerative medicine will receive a funding boost of 33 billion won (US$29 million) in 2012, four times that given in 2011. Overall, six different ministries will invest 100 billion won in stem-cell research this year.Until last year, public investment in stem cells in South Korea was relatively low and targeted mainly at basic research....

For the denizen of the inner asteroid belt known as P/2013 P5, breaking up isn’t hard to do. At least that’s the favored explanation for why the spinning object, which has an asteroid-like orbit but a comet-like appearance, is belching six tails of dust into space like a cosmic lawn sprinkler. “I’ve observed lots of comets and I’ve never seen anything as weird as this one,” says planetary scientist Harold Weaver of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland....

A genetic feedback loop installed in a yeast cell, the first of these circuits to be built in a eukaryotic cell—one with membrane-bound structures, such as a nucleus—may allow scientists to construct cells that can remember when they’ve been exposed to certain signals, a development that could one day halt the spread of cancer and better assess environmental damage. Such a project—involving new gene construction, a predictive behavioral model, and the synthesis of their desired functions—is a major step forward for the fledgling field of synthetic biology, which seeks to better understand and co-opt the machinery of cells....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Last week I talked about traveling with your electronics. In that episode, I mentioned that connecting to an unsecured or unofficial WiFi network at the airport is a really bad idea. There are many reasons you wouldn’t want to do this and today I’ll explain why. Types of Wireless Networks Let’s look at what an unsecured network is....

H. G. Wells published his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895, just a few years before Queen Victoria’s six-decade reign over the U.K. ended. An even more durable dynasty was also drawing to a close: the 200-year-old Newtonian era of physics. In 1905 Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which upset Isaac Newton’s applecart and, to Wells’s presumed delight, allowed something that had been impossible under Newton’s laws: time travel into the future....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. During the 21st century BCE, an era known as the Ur III period in Mesopotamia, many records of court hearings were drawn up in Umma, a city in what is now southern Iraq. One court record relates a dispute between two women. The name of one of the women is unknown, she was described in the text only as the wife of a man named Ur-lugal....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. King Philip’s War (1675-1678) was the pivotal engagement between the second generation of English immigrants who had arrived in New England and the Native American tribes of the region. The English won the war, and the natives lost not only their land but, in many cases, also their language and culture, at least for a time....

The world is on the brink of a “golden age” for natural gas, with demand for the low-carbon fossil fuel slated to rise by 50 percent – as much as demand for coal, oil, nuclear power combined – over the next two and a half decades, according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency. Should those trends manifest, however, the world will have little chance of halting global warming at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, the limit most scientists say is necessary if runaway climate change is to be avoided....

When replacing a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) or using bone tissue in spinal fusion to treat vertebral problems, the last thing that a doctor or patient wants to worry about is an infection or the structural integrity of the replacement part. For this reason tissues are screened, cleaned and processed to meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines. During processing, however, some tissues are sterilized typically by irradiating the replacement part or tissue, and this process can undermine its strength....

Even as astronomers work toward the hotly anticipated milestone discovery of an Earth-like twin orbiting another star, researchers are already asking what it will take to detect the existence of extraterrestrial life on such a planet. First, the bad news: No telescope in existence seems to have the observing power to pick out the kinds of molecular signals that would indicate an exoplanet is habitable or even inhabited. On the bright side, observatories now being planned or already under construction could have a shot....

Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of nuclear fission? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? It’s important to understand that nuclear fission is a mature technology and has been in commercial use for over 50 years....

The soul is the pattern of information that represents you—your thoughts, memories and personality—your self. There is no scientific evidence that something like soul stuff exists beyond the brain’s own hardwiring, so I was curious to visit the laboratories of 21st Century Medicine in Fontana, Calif., to see for myself an attempt to preserve a brain’s connectome—the comprehensive diagram of all neural synaptic connections. This medical research company specializes in the cryopreservation of human organs and tissues using cryoprotectants (antifreeze)....

By Ratnajyoti Dutta NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India’s monsoon season is set to enter its withdrawal phase by this weekend after a late surge in rainfall delayed the retreat by a fortnight, a senior weather official said, boosting output prospects for summer crops. Usually, the monsoon season enters its retreating phase from early September, and withdraws completely from the grain bowl belt of northwest India by the middle of the month....

As a dung beetle rolls its planet of poop along the ground it periodically stops, climbs onto the ball and does a little dance. Why? It’s probably getting its bearings. A series of experiments published in the January 18 issue of PLoS ONE shows that the beetles are much more likely to perform their dance when they wander off course or encounter an obstacle. Until now, no one had any idea what a jitterbugging dung beetle was up to....

When I boarded an Amtrak train this summer, I had no idea what kind of ride I was in for. Upon arrival at my home stop in Connecticut, I realized that my iPhone was missing. I still had hope, though. Apple’s free Find My iPhone service uses GPS, Wi-Fi and cellular information to locate lost i-gadgets on a map. After a couple of days, Find My iPhone e-mailed me to announce that it had found my phone—a map revealed it to be at a house in Seat Pleasant, Md....

Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was born July 5, 1996. But she was created five months earlier, in a small room at the Roslin Institute, outside Edinburgh, UK. Karen Walker, embryologist, PPL Therapeutics: On the day we made Dolly, we had such a rubbish day. Bill Ritchie, embryologist, Roslin Institute: It was February 8, 1996. I looked it up. We do know it was a rubbish day: we had various problems with infections and things....

By Shelby Sebens PORTLAND Ore. (Reuters) - A sample of albacore tuna caught off the shores of Oregon and Washington state have small levels of radioactivity from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, researchers said on Tuesday. But authors of the Oregon State University study say the levels are so small you would have to consume more than 700,000 pounds of the fish with the highest radioactive level to match the amount of radiation the average person is annually exposed to in everyday life through cosmic rays, the air, the ground, X-rays and other sources....

The nation’s most ambitious program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline has failed despite a bipartisan, 11-year effort that has cost taxpayers and companies billions. While the effort to produce cellulosic ethanol from wood and plant wastes was intended to reduce U.S. reliance on ethanol made from corn and other food sources, it has actually increased it. Those were the findings that EPA quietly delivered to Congress earlier this month amid the turmoil of former Administrator Scott Pruitt’s departure....

At 10:21 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2013, about a minute after all 183 passengers and 11 crew members from Japan Airlines Flight 008 disembarked at Boston’s Logan International Airport, a member of the cleaning crew spotted smoke in the aft cabin of the Boeing 787-8. A mechanic then opened the aft electronic equipment bay of the plane, parked at the airport gate, and saw billowing smoke and flames coming from the batteries for the 787’s auxiliary power unit (APU)....

The intellectually demanding game of chess has proved a wonderful way for psychologists to study the Einstellung effect—the brain’s tendency to stick with solutions it already knows rather than look for potentially superior ones. Experiments have shown that this cognitive bias literally changes how even expert chess players see the board in front of them. In recent years Merim Bilali of the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, Peter McLeod of The Queen’s College at the University of Oxford and other researchers have conducted some of the most insightful of such studies....