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Researchers have discovered a way to protect quantum information from environmental disruptions, offering hope for more reliable future technologies.

In their study published in Nature Communications, the scientists have shown how certain quantum states can maintain their critical information even when disturbed by . The team includes researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa (Wits University) in collaboration with Huzhou University in China.

“What we’ve found is that topology is a powerful resource for information encoding in the presence of noise,” says Professor Andrew Forbes from the Wits School of Physics.

In a crowded room, we naturally move slower than in an empty space. Surprisingly, worms can show the exact opposite behavior: In an environment with randomly scattered obstacles, they tend to move faster when there are more obstructions. Viewing the worms as “active, polymerlike matter,” researchers at the University of Amsterdam have now explained this surprising fact.

The research was published in Physical Review Letters this week, and was selected by the editors of that journal as an Editors’ Suggestion.

One way in which differ from humans is, of course, their shape: a worm’s length is much larger than its width (i.e., it is spaghetti-like), and moreover it is wiggly—or in more scientific terms: It behaves like an active polymer. The researchers suspected that this active, polymer-like behavior is what makes the worms behave in their counterintuitive way.