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Well, let me start by mentioning quantum computers. This is a radical new type of computer that doesn't use the traditional transistors that can only store a "0" or a "1" value. It uses some kind of quantum particles as "qu-bits" which each can store a "0", a "1", or a blend of these two states due to the weird properties of quantum particles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/02 ... n_funding/
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~westside/quantum-intro.html
But anyway, the point is that a quantum computer would be radically more powerful than a traditional computer. Nobody cared about quantum computing until the mathematician Peter Shor at MIT wrote a paper describing a very fast factoring algorithm using a quantum computer that could easily break the most powerful types of encryption on traditional computers.
Then the government got interested and started funding this research. Quantum computers are very hard to build and there's a lot of engineering challenges that need to overcome to make a big one (most of the ones that have been built only have a few qu-bits). Who knows? Some intelligence agencies may have already built some.
I don't know enough about computer science and physics to say too much about these computers, but if you're a science or engineering grad student with a lot of "wetware" between your ears, it seems like an exciting direction of modern research.
