The idea continues to be somewhat controversial - as is the one that your nose might be doing a bit of quantum biology.

BBC: Perfume chemist

"In a very naive way, the advantage of quantum computing is that by being a little bit of zero and a little bit of one, you can do two calculations at once, " says Raymond Laflamme, a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

FORBES: Atoms Offer Giant Leap In Computing Power

Such a quantum repeater uses groups of three photons for each bit of the message.

ECONOMIST: Quantum information technology