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Scientists and engineers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T), headquartered at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), are leading the world in the race to develop a scalable quantum computer in silicon - a material well-understood and favoured by the trillion-dollar computing and microelectronics industry.

Quantum entanglement is a phrase more likely to be heard on popular sci-fi television shows such as "Fringe" and "Doctor Who." Described by Albert Einstein as "spooky action at a distance," when two quantum things are entangled, if one is 'touched' the other will 'feel it,' even if separated by a great distance.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has begun transmitting its latest images of Saturn's icy, geologically active moon Enceladus, acquired during the dramatic Oct. 28 flyby in which the probe passed about 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the moon's south polar region. The spacecraft will continue transmitting its data from the encounter for the next several days.

Perovskite with silicon: good team but difficult to combine

The large space rock that will zip past Earth this Halloween is most likely a dead comet that, fittingly, bears an eerie resemblance to a skull.

In this artist's conception, a tiny rocky object vaporizes as it orbits a white dwarf star. Astronomers have detected the first planetary object transiting a white dwarf using data from the K2 mission. Slowly the object will disintegrate, leaving a dusting of metals on the surface of the star.

The worst forest fires in nearly two decades are burning out of control on Borneo, creating the thick blanket of smoke in this Oct. 14 image from NASA's MISR instrument.

Schematic of the work The tip of the scanning tunneling microscope (in yellow-orange) is moved over the graphene and the nanowrinkle.

This is a diagram of the dielectric capacitor research developed by a University of Delaware-led research team.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission is currently exploring comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, returning incredible views of this tiny frozen world. The Rosetta mission is a hugely ambitious endeavour – the first spacecraft to orbit a comet and follow it on its journey towards the Sun, accompanied by its lander, Philae, which made the first ever landing on a comet in November 2014. Observatories across the planet are supporting this mission, and the ING is playing an important part in this – especially in providing unique observations this year as the comet passed its closest point to the Sun and highest level of activity.
One of the key goals of the ground-based observation campaign that supports Rosetta is to understand the comet on the largest scales (the coma fills a volume tens of thousands of km across) while the spacecraft explores the very inner region (normally within 300 km of the 4 km long nucleus). To do this, observations need to look at both the shape of the coma via wide field imaging and the chemical composition of the coma gases. The gases reflect sunlight at different wavelengths, allowing them to be identified and measured using spectrograph instruments.