The need for speed. (Up front: news, trends & analysis).

Japan's NEC Corp. and a public research body have taken a step closer to ultra-fast quantum computing. Quantum computers are expected to far surpass the capabilities of today's most powerful supercomputers, particularly in areas such as data mining.

NEC and Japanese government-funded research group Riken said they had successfully created a state of quantum entanglement between two solid-state qubits for the first time. A qubit is the smallest unit of quantum data. Quantum entanglement is the entwining of two or more particles without physical contact. However, an NEC spokesperson said quantum computers were unlikely to be available for commercial use before 2020.

Internet researchers have hit a new speed record as well. Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center used fiber-optic cables to transfer 6.7 gigabytes of data--the equivalent of two DVD movies--across 6,800 miles in less than a minute. The team was able to transfer uncompressed data at 923 megabits per second for 58 seconds from Sunnyvale, California to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. That is 3,500 times faster than a typical Internet broadband connection. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center employees initially plan to use the faster data transfer speeds to share massive amounts of research collected by physicists studying the fundamental building blocks of matter.

On average, the amount of information that can be transferred over the Internet has doubled every year since 1984, scientists said. With faster computing and Internet speeds, that trend is expected to continue.