ScienceDaily (Aug. 19, 2012) — A major improvement in the world's lightest solid material and best solid insulating material, described in Philadelphia August 19, may put more of this space-age wonder into insulated clothing, refrigerators with thinner walls that hold more food, building insulation and other products.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 19, 2012) — Computing prime factors may sound like an elementary math problem, but try it with a large number, say one that contains more than 600 digits, and the task becomes enormously challenging and impossibly time-consuming. Now, a group of researchers at UC Santa Barbara has designed and fabricated a quantum processor capable of factoring a composite number -- in this case the number 15 -- into its constituent prime factors, 3 and 5.

ScienceDaily (June 11, 2012) — If female butterflies are programmed to identify males of their species by the patterns of spots on their wings, how can new wing patterns evolve in males?

ScienceDaily (June 11, 2012) — Out of control competitive aggression could be a result of a lagging neurotransmitter called dopamine, say researchers presenting a study at the Society of Nuclear Medicine's 2012 Annual Meeting. During a computer game against a putative cheating adversary, participants who had a lower capacity to synthesize this neurotransmitter in the brain were more distracted from their basic motivation to earn money and were more likely to act out with aggression.

ScienceDaily (June 11, 2012) — A solar flare is an explosive blast of light and charged particles. The powerful March 7 flare, which earned a classification of X5.4 based on the peak intensity of its X-rays, is the strongest eruption so far observed by Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). The flare produced such an outpouring of gamma rays -- a form of light with even greater energy than X-rays -- that the sun briefly became the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky.