There are many things to worry about in 2012.  The return of Quetzalcoatl, rampant earthquakes, flooding, other things that John Cusack is really good at running from.  According to NASA, however, solar flares are not one of them:

…[T]here simply isn’t enough energy in the sun to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth.

This is not to say that space weather can’t affect our planet. The explosive heat of a solar flare can’t make it all the way to our globe, but electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles certainly can. Solar flares can temporarily alter the upper atmosphere creating disruptions with signal transmission from, say, a GPS satellite to Earth causing it to be off by many yards. Another phenomenon produced by the sun could be even more disruptive. Known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), these solar explosions propel bursts of particles and electromagnetic fluctuations into Earth’s atmosphere. Those fluctuations could induce electric fluctuations at ground level that could blow out transformers in power grids. The CME’s particles can also collide with crucial electronics onboard a satellite and disrupt its systems.

via NASA

Those of us from the West tend to associate smaller numbers with the left side of the brain and larger ones with the right, based on how we learn math.  Now researchers from the University of Plymouth have taught a robot to respond the same way to numbers.

The so-called SNARC (spatial-numerical association of response codes) effect is well established: people respond faster to a number (by pressing a button, say) with their left hand when the number is small and with their right hand when the number is large. Similarly, people who have brain damage that causes them to ignore the left side of their body show a bias towards larger numbers when asked to report the middle of a numerical interval…

[The robot] was presented with a random series of odd and even numbers. In one instance iCub had to press a button with its left hand when the number was odd and right hand when it was even; in a second instance, the buttons were reversed. Like humans who have taken the same test, iCub was faster both when the number was small and it pressed the button with its left hand, and when the number was large and the button pressed was on the right.

via New Scientist

Coin-stacker Tai Star stacked 3,118 coins on a single dime.

The impressive structure consisted of 600 quarters, 501 dimes, 313 nickels, 1699 pennies and five foreign coins. He starts with the single dime and places it near the edge of a table. Star explained: ‘It is on the very corner for a few reasons: to make it easy to see that it is on one dime and I think the structure of the table is most sturdy there – plus I just like precarious balance.’

[Via Geekologie]