tweetleaks @ 12:24 PM on March 12, 2010

Newly reported observations of gas flows on the solar surface may explain why the sun recently had such an extended case of the doldrums.
From 2008 through the first half of 2009, the sun had a puzzling dearth of sunspots, flares and other storms, extending the usual lull at the end of the 11-year solar activity [...]

tweetleaks @ 5:00 AM on March 12, 2010

A desperate attempt to keep endangered Virginia big-eared bats alive in captivity has shown just how difficult that noble task may be.
The effort was prompted by the discovery of White Nose Syndrome, an extremely virulent disease that has killed more than one million bats since 2007, in one of the handful of caves where Virginia [...]

tweetleaks @ 7:00 PM on March 11, 2010

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Two years after Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the new institution sent out 100 photographers to document the nation’s environment writ large.
Now, those photos have made it out of the root cellar of the National Archive and onto Flickr Commons, where they are getting a wider viewing [...]

tweetleaks @ 4:12 PM on March 11, 2010

In the mid 1990s, a craze swept Japan and crested its way onto American shores: Kids were going crazy for the Tamagotchi, an egg-shaped digital pet. Every few hours, users would press a couple buttons to feed their Tamagotchi, play with it, or clean it up. The game was simple, but intensely rewarding. Users cried [...]

tweetleaks @ 2:20 PM on March 11, 2010

Embracing chaos just might help physicists build a quantum brain. A new study shows that disorder can enhance the coupling between light and matter in quantum systems, a find that could eventually lead to fast, easy-to-build quantum computers.
Quantum computers promise superfast calculations that precisely simulate the natural world (SN Online: 1/22/10), but physicists have struggled [...]