Store tactical military data on distributed servers, accessible through networked computers or mobile devices? Ask most officers about cloud computing and they’ll look at you patronizingly and say: Yes, Google Docs is nice, but it’s not secure enough for our secrets. (I write from experience.) But Darpa’s new budget shows that it wants the military all the way up into the cloud, and plans to set up mobile wireless hotspots so troops can reach the cloud from the most connectivity-forsaken places.

Appropriately, the goal of getting big data files to troops on the move in the middle of nowhere...

1997: The world learns of the existence of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first successfully cloned mammal.

Dolly was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. Researchers used somatic-cell nuclear transfer with a cell taken from a 6-year-old ewe. Dolly was named for Dolly Parton, the buxom country-western singer, because a mammary cell was used for the cloning process.

Dolly’s appearance touched off a debate among scientists, ethicists and others regarding the idea of man playing God and interfering with the natural order of things. The bottom-line issue here is the possibility of cloning a h...