If you’ve ever had a train set, you might remember the tiny street lamps that are often part of the model landscape. Today, the bulbs from those toy lamps are helping to shed light on quantum computing.

In fact, there’s been a spate of developments lately in quantum computing, and not just IBM’s announcement of its upcoming cloud service. Here are three recent advances from research institutions around the world.

Toys at work

Quantum computers are eagerly anticipated for the huge gains they promise in efficiency and performance. At the heart of that potential are the atomic-scale quantum bits, or “qubits,” that quantum computers rely on. Whereas traditional computers represent numbers as 0s or 1s, a qubit can simultaneously be a 0 and a 1 through a state known as superposition.

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