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As powerful as today’s traditional supercomputers are, they still struggle greatly with modeling chemical systems. For example, chemists still don’t fully understand exactly how bacteria produce fertilizer at room temperature. Considering the fact that fertilizer production is inefficient and consumes as much as two percent of the world’s energy each year, solving its mysteries could save billions of dollars. Now, researchers from Harvard, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, UC Santa Barbara, Tufts University and University College London are one step closer to being able to solve that and other difficult models…

By Jacob Aron Useful quantum computers are one step closer, thanks to the latest demonstration of a technique designed to stop them making mistakes. Quantum computers store information as quantum bits, or qubits. Unlike binary bits, which store a 0 or a 1, qubits can hold a mixture of both states at the same time, boosting their computing potential for certain types of problems. But qubits are fragile – their quantum nature means they can’t hold data for long before errors creep in. So researchers wanting to build large-scale computers invented quantum…