Each month, Business Impact will roll out a special report on an urgent topic, and each business day we'll bring you a piece of the big picture. October's topic is digital marketing, and we are focusing our coverage on a theme: "technologies of persuasion." We'll explore how companies are fusing technology together with psychology to influence brand choice, to alter behavior, and to change attitudes.Welcome to Business Impact.

This is Technology Review's new premium publication, with a new issue to be published online over the course of each month.The name Business Impact suggests our wider mission. We're broadening our coverage of innovation, by following technology beyond the labs into your hands--to the point of impact, where an innovation can become a strategic tool for transforming a company, disrupting a market or creating an entirely new industry.Business Impact will tell big stories but in a different way. [Read the full article]

Using RNA instead of DNA could avoid the health risks--and the political pitfalls--of stem-cell treatments.A Harvard researcher has developed a way to make pluripotent stem cells that solves several of the major impediments to using them to treat human diseases.Derrick Rossi, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, created pluripotent stem cells--which can turn into virtually any other type of cell in the body--from non-stem cells without using viruses to tinker with a cell's genome, as conventional methods do. This means that Rossi's method could be substantially safer for treating disease. The work is published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell."Rossi has figured out how to turn a skin cell into a stem cell without genetic modifications, and to do it efficiently," said Doug Melton, codirector of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, where Rossi is a principal faculty member, at a press conference. [Read the full article]

The Physics arXiv Blog produces daily coverage of the best new ideas from an online forum called the Physics arXiv on which scientists post early versions of their latest ideas. Contact me atKentuckyFC @ arxivblog.comOn 17 November 1970, the Soviet Union's Luna 17 mission touched down on the surface of the Moon. The lander carried a huge rover the size of a small car, called Lunokhod-1, which trundled off into lunar landscape. Over the next year or so, Lunokhod-1 travelled some 10 km over the lunar surface, sending back tens of thousands of images and carrying out soil analyses at over 500 sites.Even after it stopped working, Soviet and French scientists continued to bounce laser light off an array of French-built mirrors on the rover's back. However, the last recorded glimpse of the rover was in May 1974 and the exact details of its position have since been lost. [Read the full article]