By Ju-min Park and Kaori Kaneko

SEOUL/TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea fired four ballistic missiles into the sea off Japan's northwest on Monday, angering South Korea and Japan, days after it promised retaliation over U.S.-South Korea military drills it sees as a preparation for war.

South Korea's military said the missiles were unlikely to have been intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), which can reach the United States. The missiles flew on average 1,000 km (620 miles) and reached a height of 260 km (160 miles).

Some of the missiles landed in waters as close as 300 km (190 miles) from Japan's northwest coast, Japan's Defence Minister Tomomi Inada said in Tokyo.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said "strong protests" had been lodged with nuclear-armed North Korea, which has carried out a series of nuclear and missile tests in defiance of U.N. resolutions.

"The launches are clearly in violation of Security Council resolutions. It is an extremely dangerous action," Abe told parliament.

South Korea's acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn condemned the launches as a direct challenge to the international community and said Seoul would swiftly deploy a U.S. anti-missile defense system despite angry objections from China.

The missiles were launched from the Tongchang-ri region near the reclusive North's border with China, South Korean military spokesman Roh Jae-cheon told a briefing. It was too early to say what the relatively low altitude indicated about the types of missiles, he said.

Joshua Pollack, editor of the U.S.-based Non-Proliferation Review, said it did not appear the North had launched an ICBM.

"It sounds like a field exercise involving deployed missiles, probably ones we've seen before," Pollack said.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, also told Reuters there were no indications so far that North Korea had tested an ICBM.

The U.S. military said it detected and tracked what it assessed was a North Korean missile launch, but it did not pose a threat to North America.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a daily news briefing that China, which is holding its annual meeting of the National People's Congress, had noted North Korea's latest action.

"All sides should exercise restraint and not do anything to irritate each other to worsen regional tensions," Geng said, referring to both the missile launch and U.S.-South Korean military exercises.

JOINT DRILLS

North Korea had threatened to take "strong retaliatory measures" after South Korea and the United States began annual joint military drills on Wednesday that test their defensive readiness against possible aggression from the North.

North Korea criticizes the annual drills and has previously conducted missile launches to coincide with the exercises.

Last year, North Korea fired a long-range rocket from Tongchang-ri that put an object into orbit. That launch was condemned by the United Nations for violating resolutions that ban the use of ballistic missile technology.

North Korea test-fired a new type of missile into the sea early last month, and has said it would continue to launch new strategic weapons.

Last month's test was the first since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has vowed to rein in North Korea and its young leader, Kim Jong Un.

Trump's national security deputies have reviewed in recent meetings a range of options to counter the North's missile threat, the New York Times reported. Options include direct missile strikes on the North's launch sites and the possibility of reintroducing nuclear weapons to the South, the Times said.

Those options would soon be presented to Trump and his top national security aides, the report said, quoting U.S. administration officials.

The United States withdrew nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991 before the rival Koreas signed a declaration on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. North Korea has since walked away from the agreement, citing the threat of invasion by the United States.

"The claim that we should redeploy nuclear weapons here, 20 years after they were withdrawn, is total nonsense," said Woo Sang-ho, floor leader of South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party.

"I am formally asking the United States not to bring this issue up for consideration," Woo said in a party meeting.

Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it. Writing in Science Robotics, Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr argue that humanoid robots could be the exact tool we need to create muscle and tendon grafts that actually work.

That's where robots come in. The researchers propose a "humanoid-bioreactor system" with "structures, dimensions, and mechanics similar to those of the human body." As the robot interacted with its environment, tissues growing on its body would receive the typical strains and twists that they would if they grew on an actual human. The result would be healthy tissue, grown for the exact area on the body it was destined to replace. Mouthuy and Carr note that this would be especially helpful for "bone-tendon-muscle grafts... because failure during healing often occurs at the interface between tissues."

What would this humanoid-bioreactor system look like? It could possibly be built on top of a humanoid robot with "soft robotics" muscles made from electroactive polymers, and the growing muscles could piggyback on those to get their exercise. It would also need to be covered in soft, stretchable sensors to monitor the health of the growing tissues. The result might look a bit like the University of Tokyo's Kenshiro robot, whose actuators make realistically human movements. Its body would be covered in squishy, fluid-filled bags of engineered tissue. Patients needing tendon replacements in their hands might be able to shake hands or play piano with a robot who is wearing their future tendon grafts.

Looking to the future, Mouthuy and Carr suggest that this could be the first step toward "biohybrid humanoids" with "cell-based actuators." In other words, this robot would be like the Terminator, whose metal endoskeleton is covered in human muscles, tendons, and skin. Obviously, if we want to create truly humanoid robots, it would make sense to eventually create ones whose musculoskeletal systems are made from cellular tissue rather than stretchy polymers. After all, this tissue is self-repairing and perfectly designed to stretch and contract.

MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks predicted many years ago that humans wouldn't be replaced by robots—we would become them. In this paper about tissue engineering, we can see one possible way that prediction might come true.

Science Robotics, 2017. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aam5666


(arstechnica.com)

A surge in human infections of a deadly bird flu in China is prompting increasing concern among health officials around the world. While the human risk of these outbreaks is low at the moment, experts are calling for constant monitoring because of the large increase in cases this season, and because there are worrisome changes in the virus. U.S. officials say of all emerging influenza viruses, this particular virus poses the greatest risk of a pandemic threat if it evolves to spread readily from human to human, according to a report released Friday.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials are developing a vaccine that would target a newly evolving version of the virus.

China is experiencing its largest outbreak of the H7N9 bird flu strain, with at least 460 infections reported since October. About a third of people diagnosed with H7N9 have died of their infections, according to the World Health Organization. Human infections with this type of bird flu were first reported in China in March 2013, and since then, there have been yearly epidemics of human infections.

But this winter, the number of cases is greater than any of the previous four seasons. This year's infections account for more than a third of the 1,258 H7N9 cases that have been reported since 2013. Most human infections involve exposure to live poultry or contaminated environments, especially markets where live birds have been sold. During the previous four waves of H7N9, 88 percent of patients developed pneumonia, 68 percent were admitted to an intensive care unit and 41 percent died, according to a report from the CDC.

“This is the virus we were concerned about in 2013, and now we're seeing these increasing number of cases,” said Daniel Jernigan, who heads the CDC's influenza division, in an interview this week. “This year it came back much stronger, so the numbers of cases we're seeing has already surpassed all the other waves, and the season isn't even over yet.”

In addition, the virus has become more deadly to poultry, which might lead to more severe infections in humans, he said. For all those reasons, officials are watching developments closely.

“This is a virus you don't want to take your eyes off,” he said.

[Outgoing CDC chief talks about his greatest fear: pandemic influenza]

Among a dozen animal and bird viruses that are not yet circulating widely in people, the H7N9 virus has the greatest potential to cause a pandemic, according to the CDC. That assessment is based on the virus's ability to spread easily and efficiently to people from animals and its ability to cause serious disease.

On Wednesday, WHO officials in Geneva said the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission of H7N9 remains low. The characteristics of the infections and case fatality rate remain similar to previous waves, officials said.

But “constant change is the nature of all influenza viruses,” Wenqing Zhang, who heads WHO's global influenza program, told reporters during a media briefing Wednesday. “This makes influenza a persistent and significant threat to public health.”

One change already underway is that the virus has split into two distinct genetic lineages, with a new branch of the virus family now emerging in the current epidemic, officials said.

That has rendered the H7N9 vaccine stockpiled by the United States less effective against the newly emerging branch, officials said. The CDC is developing an influenza seed virus that can be used by vaccine manufacturers to produce another H7N9 vaccine to match a newly emerging H7N9 strain.

It will take several months to produce and test a new vaccine, a process that will get underway in June and July after vaccine manufacturers complete their work on making seasonal flu vaccine.

Vaccines to protect first responders against the highest-risk bird flu viruses are part of the pandemic flu stockpile maintained by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services responsible for providing medical countermeasures to human-made and natural threats, including pandemic influenza and emerging infectious diseases.

Rick Bright, director of BARDA, said manufacturers will be producing enough vaccine to provide 40 million doses, enough to vaccinate 20 million people, he said.

(googleweblight.com)