Big strides have been made in quantum computing this week. At the University of Waterloo, researchers have developed a method to produce entangled photon pairs from quantum dot sources, enhancing quantum communication security. This process is 65 times more efficient than previous methods. On the hardware front, IBM's Condor chip with over 1,000 qubits is facing competition from neutral-atom qubits getting over 6000 qubits on a neutral atom array. Still, IBM makes the cover of Nature with a new error correcting code. Now 12 logical qubits can be preserved for nearly 1 million syndrome cycles using 288 physical qubits. Prior surface codes would require nearly 3,000 physical qubits for the same thing. Is this getting us closer to a Shor-capable QC? Well, that is not all, Sydney-based startup Diraq has made a major breakthrough by getting quantum processors to work at temperatures 20 times warmer than previously achieved. Meanwhile, Alice & Bob in France has received a €16.5 million grant to optimize quantum computing efficiency and accelerate market readiness. 2024 is getting hotter and hotter. If that is not enough, Riken tries to make qubits by getting electrons to dive in Helium.On the algorithm side, a team from Waseda University has developed a post-processing variationally scheduled quantum algorithm (pVSQA) that outperforms conventional quantum algorithms without post-processing on real quantum devices. Another team from TU Berlin has presented a constructive proof demonstrating that quantum computers have a super-polynomial advantage over classical computers in approximating combinatorial optimization problems. Their work builds on earlier research by Kearns and Valiant and utilizes Shor’s quantum algorithm for factoring