The mountains did it.

What happened to Namdaemun?[photo from www.koreatimes.co.kr]
ONE theory, according to Jeon Hang-soo, head of Korea Oriental Topography Research Center, is that the gate was built to block the fire energy emitted from the pointy mountains around the city, and that if the gate weren't there, Gyeongbok Palace, a ways behind it, would have caught fire.

Mysterious Energy Linked to Blaze
By Park Si-soo Staff Reporter 02-11-2008 17:49
Oriental topography experts said the fire at Seoul's 600-year-old structure may have something to do with the mysterious "fire-torching" energy from a mountain in southern Seoul.
"From the perspective of Oriental topography, it is possible that the energy torched the fire," said Jeon Hang-soo, head of Korea Oriental Topography Research Center. "Basically, Seoul is more densely filled with the energy than any other cities due to the shape of mountaintops surrounding the city ― spiky and sharp. Mount Gwanak in Southern Seoul notably has the characteristic."
In Oriental topography, spiky mountaintop stands for "fire" and "hot temper."
Noting that Gyeongbok Palace, a home to kings during the Joseon Kingdom (1392~1910), Namdaemun and Mount Gwanak are topologically standing in a straight line. Kang Whan-woong, 74, a professor at Sejong University in Seoul, said "Namdaemun was constructed with the hope of blocking the 'aggressive' and 'fire-inviting' energies from sneaking into the palace."
Ancestors had installed statues of "Haetae," a tiger-shaped legendary creature, at the grand gateway in a bid to suppress the energy, he added.
If the gate had not existed, a blaze would have broke out at the palace and even the presidential office, Chung Wa Dae, the professor said.
He pointed out another two mountains in Seoul with the same characteristic as Mount Gwanak ― Mount. Bukhan in the heart of the city and Mount Dobong in Northeastern Seoul.
Some experts in Oriental topography said the number of crimes in the capital might increase in the aftermath of the gate's collapse.
"As Namdaemun, having served as a guardian restraining the 'hot-temper' and 'easy-fighting' energies from Mount Gwanak disappears, we will see the number of crimes in the capital escalating until its restoration," predicted head of the topography research center. "The restoration of Cheonggye stream has largely contributed to mixing the hostile energy with peaceful one from the manmade waterway, resulting in weakening the violent energy."
Namdaemun was given the status of "National Treasure No. 1" in 1962. The original gate was constructed in 1398, rebuilt in 1447 and has since been frequently renovated.

If that's too much for you to believe, there are other possible explanations. They've arrested a 70 year old man who admitted to carrying out arson. It is said that he is only a suspect, but from what I've read, and from his confessions, I'm pretty sure he did it.

S Korea arrests 70-year-old in landmark fire
(Agencies)Updated: 2008-02-12 10:42
SEOUL, South Korea - Police arrested a 70-year-old man suspected of setting a fire that destroyed the country's top cultural treasure, the 610-year-old Namdaemun gate in Seoul, authorities said Tuesday.
The man, identified only by his family name Chae, was arrested Monday night on Ganghwa Island, west of Seoul, Korean national news organizations said.
"The suspect has admitted he carried out an arson," police official Lee Man-kook said Tuesday, without giving further details.
The fire broke out Sunday night and burned down the wooden structure at the top of the Namdaemun gate, which once formed part of a wall that encircled the South Korean capital.
Police have secured a letter from the suspect, in which he complained about the compensation of his lands in Gyeonggi province near Seoul and he set the fire to draw social interest, Yonhap news agency said.
Hundreds of stunned South Koreans gathered near the charred structure Monday night.
"My heart is burning," Lee Il-soo, a 56-year-old man who runs a small business, said as he fought back tears. He said the fire had destroyed the pride of South Korea.
The two-tiered wooden structure was renovated in the 1960s, when it was declared South Korea's top national treasure. The government built a plaza around the gate, officially known as Sungnyemun, in 2005 and opened it to the public the following year for the first time in nearly a century.
The gate — carrying a plaque reading "The Gate of Exalted Ceremonies" in Chinese characters — had been off-limits to the public since Japanese colonial authorities built an electric tramway nearby in 1907. Japan ruled the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
The Cultural Heritage Administration said it would take at least three years to fully restore the gate and it would cost some $21 million. Some 360 firefighters fought to bring the blaze under control, said Lee Sang-joon, an official with the National Emergency Management Agency.
Yonhap reported earlier that police said Chae's physical appearance and outfit matched those of a person witnesses said climbed the stairs of the gate shortly before the fire started. It added that police found a backpack and an aluminum ladder at Chae's house that witnesses claimed the man was carrying at the scene. A bottle of thinner was also found in his house, it said.
Yonhap said the man had been charged in 2006 with allegedly setting fire to the Changgyeong Palace in Seoul, which caused $4,230 in property damage. Yonhap quoted the police officer as saying Chae was only one of several suspects.
An official at a police station handling the case refused to confirm the report.
Firefighters found two disposable lighters at the spot where they believed the fire broke out, Yonhap reported earlier, citing fire official Oh Yong-kyu.
President-elect Lee Myung-bak visited the scene Monday and deplored the destruction of the landmark, the namesake of Seoul's central district.
Kim Ok-ja, a 40-year-old public servant, said she could not sleep Sunday night after hearing of the fire because her heart was broken.
"I came here immediately after finishing work because my heart aches so much," she said after offering a white flower, a traditional symbol of grieving.

Also, there is a lot of discussion as to WHY Korea didn't have more surveilance or protection for Namdaemun, their No. 1 National Treasure. 24 hour guards, more cameras or such. Who knows. I think that Korea doesn't have a lot of the vandalism problems that many countries have to deal with.

Poor Security Blamed for Gate Burnout
By Kim RahnStaff Reporter 02-11-2008 18:54
Security loopholes were detected after an overnight destruction of the nation's top treasure Sungnyemun Gate, also known as Namdaemun, in central Seoul.
Experts said that the fire that destroyed the city's landmark wooden architecture was destined to happen due to the opening of the treasure to the public without appropriate security measures. They said the seeds of the accident were sown in 2006 when the gate was open to the people with the exception of second floor of the gate.
Despite the free access to the gate, only six infrared sensors and four CCTVs were installed around it, with no monitoring inside the gate, police said.
Eight fire extinguishers were the only anti-fire equipments for Sungnyemun, according to the Cultural Heritage Administration and Jung-gu ward office. There were neither fire alarms nor sprinklers.
KT Telecop, a security services unit of KT Corp., has been in charge of security of the gate since late January. The security firm failed to spot the fire immediately and its security officials were on the scene later than firefighters.
As to the start of the fire, night lighting equipment had the possibility of short circuiting, while arson was feared as people could easily access the gate.
Three workers from the ward office guarded Namdaemun on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. when the arched gate at the center of the structure was open, and one worker on weekends.
During nighttime, however, the cultural asset was guarded by an unmanned security system of the security firm. Some pointed out that the blaze could have been brought under control at the start of the fire if a night duty worker had been stationed there.
"Three workers are posted there during the daytime, but their main job is opening and closing the gate, providing information to tourists and checking the condition of the structure. We had only an unmanned security system at night, so it was difficult to take immediate measures against fire or other damage occurring at nighttime," a Seoul City official said.
He said a state managed system should have been prepared ― for example, the government directly managing cultural properties or providing an adequate budget to local authorities in charge of management.
After the fire at Naksan Temple in Gangwon Province in April 2005, which destroyed a bronze bell, Treasure No. 479, the administration has promoted a disaster prevention project at major wooden cultural heritages, setting up fire-fighting equipment at four temples so far. Sungnyemun was included in the project, but had not been equipped with such systems.
The official also said that the law on cultural property protection focuses only on "preserving the assets in their original forms," and thus restricts installing fire-fighting equipment.
"To keep the cultural properties' in their original forms, the law allows only simple fire-fighting equipment such as fire extinguishers. Installing equipment using electricity, such as fire alarms, is restricted to prevent possible damage to them," an official of the National Emergency Management Agency said.
Lee Sung-won, deputy cultural property administrator, said Monday that the authorities will make efforts to restore Sungnyemun as it was.
Besides Namdaemun and Naksan Temple, the nation has seen several cases of fire, which resulted in damage to cultural heritage sites. In April 2006, a man set one of the buildings in Changgyeong Palace in central Seoul on fire. In May 2007, fire started by an arsonist demolished a wooden pavilion in Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, a World Cultural Heritage. Earlier this year, two middle school girls set fire to a grass field near the fortress while searching for their cell phones.

An apple a day

Makes sense. And I just bought a big bag of apples today! :)

Eat apples, bananas and oranges to boost memory
Saturday, 02 February , 2008, 19:09
New York: Regular consumption of apples, bananas and oranges can protect the brain from damage and also improve memory, suggests a new study by American and South Korean scientists.
These fruits are important sources of vitamins, minerals and fibre. Of the three, apples appeared to contain the most antioxidants, followed by bananas and oranges, the study found.
Scientists at Cornell University, New York, and their colleagues from several universities in South Korea exposed cancer cells to phenolics - a class of chemical compounds extracted from the three fruits, health portal Medical News Today reported.
The scientists then put the cells under oxidative stress - a general term used to describe the damage in a cell, tissue or organ caused by reactive oxygen species.
The researchers discovered that the chemical of the fruits had prevented a significant proportion of cells from succumbing to damage from oxidative stress, with varying degrees of success.

Glow-in-the-dark cats!!???

Like a glow worm, only better!!!!

Glowing Cats in Korea Could Advance Stem Cell Treatments
Tim King Salem-News.com Dec-14-2007 09:37
(SEOUL, South Korea) - Cats that glow in the dark? That's what researchers in an animal cloning expert at Gyeongsang National University, in Jinju, South Korea announced this week. As the photos demonstrate, a cat possessing red fluorescence protein, "RFP" glows in the dark when it is exposed to ultraviolet light.
The team, led by animal cloning expert Kong Il-keun, announced Wednesday that they had cloned the two RFP cats for the first time in the world. They say the advancement is significant, though South Korea's bio-engineering industry is still feeling the effects of a much-touted achievement by cloning expert Hwang Woo-Suk that turned out to be a fraud.
Hwang is now banned by the Korean government from any research using human eggs, after his claims last year to have created the first human stem cells through cloning were found to be untrue. He's now on trial, facing charges of Fraud and Embezzlement.
The scientists involved in this South Korean program created the glowing cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene. It is a procedure that could eventually lead to treatments for human genetic diseases according to researchers.
They say the glow in the dark aspect is a side effect that happens when the cloned cats are exposed to ultraviolet beams.
So far, Kong Il-keun's team of a cloning experts at Gyeongsang National University have produced three cats that possess altered fluorescence protein genes, the South Korean Ministry of Science and Technology reported.
The cats were born in January and February. One was stillborn, but two grew to become adult Turkish Angoras weighing about six and a half pounds. Ministry of Science and Technology officials say "It marked the first time in the world that cats with RFP genes have been cloned."
They say the new technology can also help in the development of stem cell treatments. Cats share more than 250 kinds of genetic diseases that affect humans.
The technology may also help clone endangered animals like tigers, leopards and wildcats.

why do i worry so much?

I worry all the time about too many things. Maybe this is why.??

Why Women Worry So Much
By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer 28 September 2007 10:15 am ET
Scientists have known that on the whole, females of all ages tend to worry more and have more intense worries than males. Women also tend to perceive more risk in situations and grow more anxious than men.
Now we know why.
Women are more likely than men to believe that past experiences accurately forecast the future, according to two new studies.
The research, involving both 3- to 6-year-olds and adults of both genders, tested the extent to which participants' thought that worry can be caused by thinking that a bad event that happened in the past could happen again in the future. (This skill, in its simplest form, is critical to social understanding as it is important to making decisions and assessing risk.)
For the first study, subjects listened to six stories that featured characters harmed by another person or animal in the story. Many days later, the character felt worried or changed their behavior when confronted with the same wrongdoer who had hurt them before. (For example, if one little boy stole a toy from another, the child might be worried when he saw that boy again and hide the new toy he was playing with.)
The second study was the same, except that the person or animal the character ran across later only looked similar to the one that had harmed them before.
At the end of each story, the participants were asked to explain why the character was worried or changed their behavior.
Females, both children and adults, were more likely to use uncertainty to explain the character's reaction, that is, they tended to explain the reaction in terms of events that might happen versus those that will happen, the researcher reported. They also tended, more than males, to predict that the characters who encountered the new character who looked similar to the wrongdoer would feel worried because they thought the new character would also do them harm.
The studies, detailed in the Sept./Oct. issue of the journal Child Development, also found that children increasingly made these kinds of past-to-future connections as they got older, which yields insight into their cognitive development.
"These results are significant because they reveal that knowledge about the impact of past-to-future thinking on emotions and behaviors develops during the preschool years," said study author Kristin Lagattuta of the University of California, Davis.

An older but related article:

Men and Women Really Do Think Differently
By Bjorn Carey, LiveScience Staff Writer 20 January 2005 02:12 pm ET
Men and women do think differently, at least where the anatomy of the brain is concerned, according to a new study.
The brain is made primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter and white matter. This new research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white. Researchers stressed that just because the two sexes think differently, this does not affect intellectual performance.
Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine led the research along with colleagues from the University of New Mexico. Their findings show that in general, men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence compared with women, whereas women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared to men.
"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said Haier, adding that, "by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain."
The results are detailed in the online version of the journal NeuroImage.
In human brains, gray matter represents information processing centers, whereas white matter works to network these processing centers.
The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, Jung said, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills.
Scientists find it very interesting that while men and women use two very different activity centers and neurological pathways, men and women perform equally well on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as intelligence tests.
This research also gives insight to why different types of head injuries are more disastrous to one sex or the other. For example, in women 84 percent of gray matter regions and 86 percent of white matter regions involved in intellectual performance were located in the frontal lobes, whereas the percentages of these regions in a man's frontal lobes are 45 percent and zero, respectively. This matches up well with clinical data that shows frontal lobe damage in women to be much more destructive than the same type of damage in men.
Both Haier and Jung hope that this research will someday help doctors diagnose brain disorders in men and women earlier, as well as provide help designing more effective and precise treatments for brain damage.