Max Planck entering South Korea

 Germany's Max Planck Institute is starting a partnership with an institution in South Korea. This comes on the heels of another joint institution in Shanghai. Max Planck already has other full-fledged institutes in Europe outside Germany proper.

I'm a big fan of the Max Planck institutes, in that I think there is a place for relatively small, focused research institutes outside of academia, and I'm happy to see that they continue to expand. I hope some day they consider opening Max Planck Boston -- preferably focused on language acquisition, since an institute dealing with particle physics wouldn't be as useful to me.