Engineering giant Honeywell burst into the quantum computing race out of left field last year. Now the company has provided the first concrete details of how its device works in a peer-reviewed journal . Unlike its main rivals Google and IBM, who rely on superconducting qubits, Honeywell is using trapped ions to power its device.

Matter is what makes up the universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for those who think about it - especially for the physicists. Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and I have described an updated way to think about matter.