The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a ‘large number

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It might seem like something straight from the Star Trek universe, but two new research experiments-one involving a photon and the other involving a super-conducting circuit-have successfully demonstrated the teleportation of quantum bits.

If that sounds like gobbledygook, don’t worry. We got in touch with one of the researchers, physicist Andreas Wallraff, of the Quantum Device Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, to explain how his team and a team based at the University of Tokyo were able to reliably teleport quantum states from one place to another.

People have done this before but it hasn’t necessarily been reliable. The new complementary research, which comes out in Nature today, is reliable-and therefore may have widespread applications in computing and cryptography.

Before we talk about the nitty-gritty part of teleportation, we need to define a few key words. Let’s start with a regular, classical bit of information, which has two possible states: 1 or 0. This binary system is used by basically all computing and computing-based devices. Information can be stored as a 1 or a 0, but not as both simultaneously. (Related: ‘The Physics Behind Schrodinger’s Cat.’)

But a quantum bit of information-called a qubit-can have two values at the same […]

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If you’re looking for a Republican congressman who truly embodies the ethos of the Tea Party, Maryland Representative Andy Harris is a pretty good pick.

Harris, you see, is no fan of ‘big government’ and he’s definitely not a fan of Rinos (‘Republicans in name only’).

Harris made a national name for himself in 2008, when he successfully launched a primary campaign against insufficiently conservative 18-year congressional veteran Wayne Gilchrest. Although Harris lost in the general election, he was more successful two years later, joining his Tea Party contingent in the House of Representatives.

As a congressman, Harris has had a difficult time finding a single government program or legislative initiative he doesn’t hate. He opposed the debt limit deal in the summer of 2011; he was one of the handful of Republicans to vote against the fiscal cliff deal in January 2013; he’s against immigration reform, foreign aid, more money for Pell grants, and even the Violence Against Women Act.

And, of course, he hates Obamacare.

This record of conservative allegiance would, you might imagine, inoculate Harris from Tea Party criticism. Yet, earlier this month, in a town hall meeting in his home district, he was assailed by his constituents – for not being […]

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Here’s what’s going on in China right now, as the country trudges through its hottest summer in over half a century - and its second major heat wave this year: people are dying, while trees, billboards and buses have all been witnessed spontaneously bursting into flames.

The spontaneous combustion of trees ‘rarely happens under normal circumstances,

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A study released Wednesday on the effect of climate change on old-growth redwood forests revealed a surprising silver lining: not only have the trees thrived as the temperature has risen, but they may also be an unparalleled tool in fighting global warming.

The Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative, a multiyear research study by UC Berkeley, Humboldt State University and Save the Redwoods League, examined the tree rings of coast redwoods in Northern California, providing the most comprehensive redwood chronology available today.

Researchers found that the trees have experienced an unprecedented growth spurt in recent decades, and that redwood forests can store up to three times more carbon than non-redwood forests worldwide.

‘Not only are the trees growing quickly, but they are sequestering that carbon into wood,’ said Emily Burns, Director of Science for Save the Redwoods League.

According to researchers, the results mean that redwoods may not only survive climate change, but they could be one of our greatest natural defenses against increasing levels of atmospheric carbon.

‘The redwoods’ ability for carbon storage is the big message here,’ Richard Campbell, Conservation Science Manager at Save the Redwoods, told The Huffington Post. ‘It’s not so much what effect climate change has on these trees, but rather […]

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