Brent VanDevender, a physicist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, hasn’t had this much fun doing science for a while. In this episode, he shares how a chance conversation with a colleague led to a better understanding of the limitations of quantum computing. The study, published in the journal Nature, shows that qubits need to be shielded from natural radiation, like cosmic rays. And the research links the vanishingly small quantum bits to the search for dark matter in space.