Scientists Teleport Not Kirk, but an Atom

Somewhere out there, there's a fly with an extra beryllium atom.

I was under the impression that this had been done about a year ago....

It was done with photons I belive. A much less complex structure

Ahh you're right. Or at least as far as I can trust my memory.

Er - what does this " taking characteristics of one atom and imprinting them on a second" mean?

Did they teleport an atom, or make a different one like the first one? (And how do you tell atoms apart?)

Isn't that fuzzy science at a distance?

"the feat of teleportation is transferring information from atom A to atom C without the two meeting. The third atom, B, is an intermediary".

"The three atoms can be thought of as boxes that can contain a 1 or a zero, a bit of information like that used by a conventional computer chip. The promise of quantum computers is that both a zero and a 1 can exist at once, just like the perplexing premise described by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in which a cat in a box can be simultaneously alive and dead until someone looks inside".

"First, atoms B and C were brought together, making them "entangled" and creating an invisible link between the two atoms no matter how far apart they were. Atom C was moved away. Next, A and B were similarly entangled".

"Then the scientists measured the energy states of A and B, essentially opening the boxes to see whether each contained a 1 or a zero. Because B had been entangled with C, opening A and B created an instant change in atom C, what Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," and this, in essence, set a combination lock on atom C, with the data in A and B serving as the combination".

"For the final step, the combination was sent and a pulse of laser light was applied to atom C, almost magically turning it into a replica of the original A. Atom A was teleported to atom C.

Damn world gets weirder and weirder every time I dare to look.......heehee....