Fans of the manga Ghost In the Shell no doubt remember one of the more visually stunning pages at the beginning of the saga, CG art depicting a neurochip, which in the series was the technology underlying artificial intelligence and the prosthetic brains which made full body cyborgs possible. Not a few of us have dreamed of the day in which it would be possible to directly interface doped silicon processors with our wetware and move information out of one and into the other with little more than a thought. However, our science fiction-fueled dreams are just that, dreams, and …

Quantum computing, thought by many to be the holy grail of information technology, is based upon one of the basic tenants of quantum mechanics: a particle, be it a photon, a hydrogen atom, or a molecule of water, exists in a multitude of states (location, spin, orientation, what have you) until you actually examine it, at which time the particle suddenly 'picks' a state and stays that way as long as you're watching.  At least that's the most commonly quoted interpretation of the math.  At Yale University a team of scientists has created the first purely electronic quantum processor and …