Last year gave us the news of a madly love-struck astronaut, and this year, we'll be witnessing how taking out books outside the premises without asking permission will take something important away from you: in this case, the privilege to be the first person from your country to be sent into space. Read all about it in the full article.

South Korea's Ko San will be blasting off to the International Space Station bringing with him his country's national dish, kimchi.

Apparently, it took three government research institutes, millions of dollars and years in order to make this thing happen. Find out more after the jump!

Last time, it was the United Kingdom and South Korea. This time, it's Poland. And yes, the strain of bird flu involved was the dreaded H5N1 strain, which has been known to infect humans as well as birds.

Find out where those sites were located after the jump!

In South Korea, they make glow-in-the-dark kittens. Or at least, a group of cloning experts there were recently able to clone cats that glow in the dark under ultraviolet light. More on this at the full article!

Thousands of sitting ducks in South Korea met a violent end last Saturday following a new bird flu outbreak in the country. While the South Korean government confirmed that the virus was indeed bird flu, government officials reported that the outbreak was caused by a different strain of the virus.

What makes this strain of bird flu different? Find out after the jump!

61-year-old Israeli pediatrician Igal Kushnir and his company Deep Breeze has developed a new technology called Vibration Response Imaging (VRI). What it does is measure energy generated in the lungs, analyze it, and then display an image of the person's lungs in one go.

This new technology has been found to accurately diagnose lung conditions such as asthma, pneumonia, and lung tumors.
 
What makes this method so amazing is the fact that it uses no radiation. It works by analyzing acoustic vibrations resonating or sounds from a person's lungs, much like a stethoscope. The lung vibrations are then fed to a computer, where it's displayed as images.

Deep Breeze was given approval by the US Food and Drug Administration last July 23 to begin marketing a VRI device in the U.S. Other countries such as Israel, the European Union, and South Korea have also cleared the product for distribution.

While the technology is still expensive at an average price of US$ 40,000 to US$ 50,000 per unit. Deep Breeze is working to create cheaper versions of it which will go for as low as US$ 10,000 per machine. This is big news in the medical community as this device will undoubtedly save a lot of lives by removing a lot of the guesswork usually experienced in using the common stethoscope.

No, that's not a typo, and no, we're not kidding. Reports from the Yonhap news agency have recently been going around saying that South Korea is already picking out the lucky people who would become their first astronauts, and who will then be trained and sent into space by 2008. Their mission would be to conduct some experiments alongside their Russian counterparts.

However, one cannot expect to just be thrown into orbit without some comfort food, right? This is where the Korea Food Research Institute comes in, since they are currently working to find ways to send their national dish, kimchi, into space. They are collaborating with a culinary institute in Kazakhstan who has previously provided yum-yums to Russian space crews.

Besides kimchi though, they are also planning to send kimchi's friends along for the trip: gochujang (a sort of chili paste), and ginseng. Whether these dishes will end up in either paste form or as dehydrated food items in a foil bag is unknown, though many are also led to wonder if the said supply of space kimchi will also be served with a helping of space breath mints.

Kansas senior federal regulator Chuck Lambert says that the often controversial field of biotechnology is the best way to protect the nation’s agriculture sector from mad cow disease, avian flu and other diseases and pests, and beef producers agree.

The industry suffered a major blow after mad cow disease was detected in the US. The American Angus Association says that biotech diagnostics, to prove that beef supply is free of diseases or provide early warning so outbreaks can be isolated and controlled, are "effective" and "scientifically proven to be accurate."

Lambert also said that biotech diagnostics is the key to winning the confidence of overseas markets which banned billions of dollars worth of U.S. beef following the detection of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease).  “We have seen what happens... when the public loses that confidence... overreaction and over-regulation beyond what the science would indicate.”

It was only in recent weeks that the flow of U.S. beef into Japan has resumed. Meanwhile a South Korean team is inspecting processing facilities which will determine their decision on whether to reopen their markets to beef produced in the US.

Mad cow disease is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease of cattle which is suspected to be transmitable to humans. Mad cow is thought to cause a brain-wasting disease in humans known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD). Following an outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain in 1986, 157 people acquired and died of the disease. Many of the vCJD patients were directly linked to consuming tainted beef. This now believed to be the mechanism for contracting the disease.

China is the second largest consumer of energy next to the USA with coal as its primary fuel. Large amount of carbon emissions and sulfur dioxide (major ingredients of acid rain) from its power power plants plus the growing number of automobiles in the country would lead to what's going on in this image.

A visible pool of air pollution from China is being carried by the Westerlies toward downwind countries like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Trans-boundary pollution like this one happens regularly in many places around the globe.

This image is taken from, the SeaWiFS Mission, which is part of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, designed to look at our planet from space to better understand it as a system in both behavior and evolution.