Am I reading this correctly, or will the 'infinite improbability drive' be invented real soon now? (An odd coincidence after the Tesla thread too...) --Rob

Edupage, 26 January 1997. Edupage, a summary of news about information technology, is provided three times a week as a service by Educom, a Washington, D.C.-based consortium of leading colleges and universities seeking to transform education through the use of information technology.

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COMPUTER IN A COFFEE CUP While a conventional computer stores its bits of information by assuming one of two possible states (a 1 or a 0), a quantum computer theoretically could store much more information by using all the potential states of anatom. Scientists are now proposing a new way to harness the power of quantum computing, using nuclear magnetic resonance devices to control the movement of millions of atoms within an evenly heated volume of material. By coordinating the nuclear spin of the particles, physicists could make them act collectively as qubits (quantum bits). A liquid with the rightthermal properties (such as coffee, which is known for its unusually evenheating characteristics) could hold up to 10 qubits, but scientists are still looking for ways to create a liquid computer that could hold up to 40 qubits -- perhaps out of "a really expensive cup of structured coffee," says a University of California, Santa Barbara researcher. (Science News 18 Jan 97 p37)