At the turn of the century, two unassuming chemists collaborated on the seemingly mundane task of converting nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. At the end of their collaboration, they had changed the course of our civilisation forever. At the Colorado School of Mines, a new collaboration has taken place in chemical and biological engineering, between Professor Colin Wolden and Professor Douglas Way. The result is an alternative approach to creating ammonia – and it may well be just as important as its predecessor.

The potential capabilities of universal quantum computers have many of us excited, but there’s one problem – we aren’t close to building complex, functional quantum computers just yet. In the meantime, scientists need to test the capabilities of quantum computing using simulations on conventional computers, which requires enormous amounts of computing power. However, over the last decade, Professor Hans De Raedt at the University of Groningen and his collaborators have been working on a piece of software that has already greatly improved these simulations.

Professor Karen Feigh and Dr Matthew Miller from the Georgia Institute of Technology examine what support will be required when astronauts need to work outside in deep space, where communication with Earth takes tens of minutes. Software engineer, Cameron Pittman, also joined the team to help develop functional prototypes so they can be tested in the lab and beyond.

From the metal in our cars to the circuits in our phones, the materials we use in our everyday lives can be meticulously engineered on a molecular scale to suit our requirements. However, there are so many possible arrangements of atoms and molecules at this scale that it is incredibly difficult for scientists to engineer materials optimised for the tasks they are designed to perform. Dr Ganesh Balasubramanian and his team at Lehigh University are working on solving this problem with help from an unlikely source of inspiration – the female cuckoo bird.

Quantum mechanics has greatly improved the speeds at which computers make calculations, but new research shows that quantum computers can be made to run even faster. Professor Philip Walther and his team at the University of Vienna have shown that the very orders in which quantum computers carry out operations can be superimposed, essentially meaning that two or more operations can be carried out at the same time. This work could give rise to even more efficient quantum computers in the near future, but also leaves some baffling questions about our physical understanding of the Universe.

The ‘Pillars of Creation’ is one of the most iconic images ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, but the processes that formed these colossal tendrils of the Eagle Nebula are still not entirely understood. To test emerging theories, Drs Marc Pound, Jave Kane, David Martinez and Bruce Remington are using the National Ignition Facility, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, to recreate the conditions that formed the pillars, on a much smaller scale.