Okay, so, it works like this: little tiny gremlins who are really good at math sit inside a box that’s supposed to be a "quantum computer," and break encrypted code really quickly. The world goes ga-ga, millions of the boxes are sold, and that’s how an entire industry of gremlin slavery gets started.

Okay, I admit it, I wrote that because I really don’t get this quantum computing stuff. It all seems like it’s going to fall apart one day when some mathematician slaps his head and say, "Guys, look, we forgot a decimal point here!" But nevertheless, at the University of Michigan, they’ve been using light pulses to make quantum computers run faster (how? gotta be a quantum scientist to know). According to the researchers, the systems would be capable of cracking "highly encrypted codes" in minutes, not years, and on the flipside creating even stronger security.

And the day of our Robotic Overlords taking over moves inexorably closer.

Quantum physics is a strange area to explore, but here we are, on that very frontier. Two German scientists, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have broken the speed of light.

Their experiment consisted of microwave photons (energetic packets of light) which traveled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart. They achieved this by "quantum tunnelling", which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws, in essence, throwing out all our physical laws

Breaking this speed of light threshold leads to mind-bending consequences. Like an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving. Hmmmm.

An international team, including scientists from the London Center for Nanotechnology, has detected a hidden magnetic "quantum order" in a ceramic without classical magnetism. The scientists found that despite the apparent classical disorder, magnetic excitations could propagate over long chains of atoms at low temperature – in the otherwise magnetically disordered material..

In quantum information processing, data is recorded and manipulated as quantum bits or ‘qubits’, generalizations of the classical ‘0′ and ‘1′ bits which are traditionally represented by the ‘on’ and ‘off’ states of conventional switches.

"We had two objectives," explains Professor Gabriel Aeppli, Director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the paper’s senior author. "The first was to show that we could actually image the quantum order, which is sometimes referred to as phase coherence. The second aim was to manipulate the distance over which it can be maintained."

Image of quantum order made using neutrons by the LCN (London Centre for Nanotechnology)/UCL team and its collaborators from the US and Japan at the ISIS particle accelerator in the UK. The sharp red peak in the middle of the picture corresponds to nearly perfect quantum coherence. (Credit: Image courtesy of University College London)