Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles explains the recent quantum computing results:

So, imagine a different experiment– rather than waiting until the results are 50/50, make the measurement a much shorter time after the excitation– a tenth of a second, say. The probability that the atom has already decayed is really, really small– 0.002%– so you’re really likely to find it in the excited state, after which the atom is entirely in the excited state again, and the decay clock starts over. Then measure it again, and again, and again, waiting a tenth of a second each time. After ten measurements, you’re one second past the original excitation, and the probability of finding the particle in the excited state is almost 100% (99.98%, give or take). If you keep making measurements at short intervals, you can keep the atom in the excited state basically forever.

The cool thing is, you can do this sort of thing with passive measurements. You don’t have to bounce a photon off the atom to prove that it’s in the excited state– instead, you can send in a photon that will only be absorbed by a ground-state atom, and see what happens. If it isn’t absorbed (and it most likely won’t be), that’s just as effective at keeping the atom in the excited state as if you’d done something more active to detect the excited-state atom.

Essentially the best, most concise explanation I’ve encountered.