SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea's love for cabbage - the key ingredient in its national dish, kimchi - apparently doesn't extend to the baseball field. The Korea Baseball Organization ruled that wearing cabbage leaves inside a baseball cap constitutes as an "alien material" that may disrupt a game, the organization said in a statement.

The decision came after Doosan Bears pitcher Park Myung-hwan's cap fell off twice in a game last Sunday, revealing frozen cabbage leaves. He was using the vegetables to keep his head cool and no measures were taken at the time. "What will we do if another team argues that because the cabbage leaf fell just as the pitcher was pitching, the batter got confused?" league rules committee chair Heo Koo-youn said, according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency.

For years, the U.S. military has explored a new kind of firepower that is instantaneous, precise and almost inexhaustible: beams of electromagnetic energy. "Directed-energy" pulses can be throttled up or down depending on the situation, much like the phasers on Star Trek could be set to kill or merely stun. Such weapons are now nearing fruition.

...[t]he hallmark of all directed-energy weapons is that the target - whether a human or a mechanical object - has no chance to avoid the shot because it moves at the speed of light. At some frequencies, it can penetrate walls.
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A separate branch of directed-energy research involves bigger, badder beams: lasers that could obliterate targets tens of miles away from ships or planes. Such a strike would be so precise that, as some designers put it at a recent conference here, the military could plausibly deny responsibility. [keep reading article in WIRED]