These days, technological discoveries and endeavors tend to fall into the "sounds like science fiction" category — a label that seems particularly fitting with a number of Google's (News - Alert) current projects. However, even Google Glass and the self-driving car seem positively banal compared to the company's latest project.

Google has teamed up with NASA to launch a new laboratory focused solely on advancing machine learning. Hosted at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, the Quantum (News - Alert) Artificial Intelligence Lab will feature a quantum supercomputer to be used by researchers from the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and other areas of the academic world to help reach new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

Google thinks that quantum computing may ultimately help improve its Web searching and speech recognition technology, with the added benefit of assisting researchers in creating better models of disease and climate patterns. It's possible this project may be related to Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering and creator of the first text-to-speech software, asserting in April that the next step for Google Search is understanding human emotions.

"If you write a blog post, you've got something to say, you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning. If that happens, and I believe that it's feasible, people could ask more complex questions," said Kurzweil at the time.

So far, quantum computing has already developed quantum machine-learning algorithms that can quickly recognize data, saving power on mobile devices and efficiently sorting out any invalid information from "highly polluted training data." This may be a far cry from emotional comprehension, but it's progress nonetheless.

The quantum computer being used in this project was supplied by D-Wave Systems and operates differently from typical supercomputers in that it combines atoms to work together as quantum bits.