Ran Gao

The rows of wires stretching from the warm room into the fridge holding the quantum chip look like a tangled telephone exchange from the last century. Each qubit needed its own analog channel for precise tuning, and the cables carried extra heat and got underfoot. Now researchers have placed a digital-to-analog converter right in the cold zone, next to the qubits.

Eight bright spots on the radio sky. They are all the same quasar HS 0810+2554, whose light passed through a gravitational lens — a massive foreground galaxy.