This video, subtitled in French, provides a concise introduction to the idea of strange attraction (at least I think that's what it is called when two atoms remain in the same state across a distance?). It's tough to tell the name of the series that this clip comes from. However, it seems like the video would make for a great classroom introduction to the idea for school children.

This goes under the, "it's news to me category". In 2001 scientists were able to stop the forward travel of light and then make the light pulse reverse direction. It happened in 2001 according to this article. They used a chamber filled with some prepared Rubidium (Rb) vapor and a control laser used to excite the Rb in a certain way.

A company called D-Wave introduced what they called the first commercial quantum computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. This computer is said to use a process called adiabatic quantum computing to achieve 16-quibits (quantum bits) of processing speed. D-Wave also claims that they will be able to achieve 1000 quibits within the next year.

This claim has been met with some skepticism. In this AP news release, it is noted that D-Wave themselves are not sure the computer is using true quantum calculations. Also, it is noted that adiabatic quantum computing is not 'true' quantum computing. Although it does use some quantum mechanic principles. Arstechnica.com has more information defining adiabatic computing. I presume that the basic idea behind adiabatic quantum computing comes from thermodynamics, describing a process that changes infinitely slowly

Yale Physicists working on making Quantum Computers a reality have created a chip that measures and stores microwave photons. The article is much more detailed. I recommend referring to it if this sort of thing interests you. The general idea, however, is that the Yale Institute of Nanoscience and Quantum Engineering created an artificial 'atom' of aluminum atoms. This artificial atom was bombarded with microwaves. Somehow the chip they created stores and measures the individual microwave photons. It turns out that microwave photons are very much like photons of light, except larger ('over 1cm in length') and with much less energy. The idea I get from the article is that the whole experimental setup is basically making a huge mock up of the quantum processes currently being studied elsewhere in order to gain some further insights.

Scientists in Boulder, CO have sent a Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) signal across 107 km. of fiber optic cable. This is the first long distance demonstration of this technology. Theoretically QKD encodes a single photon with a security key. However, in practice it has proven difficult to encode a single photon. If multiple photons are encoded a photon-number-splitting (PNS) attack by an eavesdropper is possible. The difficulty of encoding one photon was overcome by using a decoy-state protocol.