The doc suggests that it may be possible in future to simply grow new organs and limbs for injuried or sick humans - even, perhaps, to repair their damaged brain in situ.

"If we know what is happening when tissues are regenerated under normal circumstances, we can begin to formulate how to replace damaged and diseased organs, tissues and cells in an organised and safe way following an injury caused by trauma or disease."

South Korea said the operating system is aimed at monitoring user activity.

The Red Star operating system uses a popular Korean folk song as its start-up music and numbers years using a calendar which starts counting from the birth of state founder Kim Il-sung, making 2010 the 99th year.

Green wrote on his Twitter account late last week: "Booted twice -- and progress lost -- on my single-player C&C4 game because my DSL connection blinked. DRM fail. We need new solutions," continuing later, "Well. I've tried to be open-minded. But my 'net connection is finicky -- and the constant disruption of my C&C4 SP game makes this unplayable. The story is fun, the gameplay is interesting and different at least -- but if you suffer from shaky/unreliable DSL -- you've been warned."

It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they use open source software.

What's Special 301? It's a report that examines the "adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights" around the planet - effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism.

Using anesthetized pigs, the doctors are testing various compounds, some containing hydrogen sulfide, to find one that can safely keep the hemorrhaging animals "as close to death as possible."

A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and - hopefully - as good as new.

Scientists had to give up on a study of pornography - because they couldn't find any men who had not watched hardcore movies before.

"We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography but we couldn't find any."

Experts said the findings provided an explanation for the "hygiene hypothesis", which holds that exposure to germs during early childhood primes the body against allergies.

Many believe our obsession with cleanliness is to blame for the recent boom in allergies in developed countries.

A spokeswoman for Allergy UK said there was a growing body of evidence that exposure to germs was a good thing.

Sifting through minefields to remove these hidden threats is currently a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process, however scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap.

Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow green wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present.

Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go.

"We found some of those problems to be frustrating and decided that the only way to address them was linguistically," said Rob Pike, a principal software engineer working on Go. "We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better."

Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley.

Presently it appears that the worm does nothing more malicious than spread and change the infected user's lock screen wallpaper. However, that doesn't mean that attacks like this can be considered harmless.