This could be used to cheaply transport gold from place to place, so if people went back to using gold in transactions, this would mean that a bank could never run-out of gold at its local branches because more gold could be beamed to the branch from the bank's central safe.

a little bit at a time... now we just have to get it to room-temperature, septillions of atoms and molecules, wireless (or fibre-less), mass-produced, energy-efficient and cheap.

preferably within a few years so i can go skiing without having to drive for forty minutes.

#7, 14, and 15 are on the right track.

This will let you transport anything you want, as long as its a Bose-Einstein condensate of helium, and you happen to have another condensate lying around on the other end of your fiber. Not "star trek" by a long shot.

Here is how it works:

A Bose-Einstein condensate is simply a group of atoms which share a coherent quantum state. It needs to be at such a low temperature so that thermal "kicks" don't "shake" the atoms and destroy the coherence of the system. So you have a condensate in a particular quantum state. Now you blast it with a laser pulse. The laser destroys the coherence of the condensate (it "disappears"), but the laser pulse is also modified by the condensate. Now the change in the laser pulse is related to the exact state that the condensate was in - so the laser contains the information of the state of the first condensate. Then the laser pulse is coupled into an optical fiber, and eventually the pulse comes out the other end of the fiber. At the other end, you've got some other Bose-Einstein condensate sitting there, and when the laser pulse hits it, the pulse changes the state of the second condensate into that of the first condensate. And viola, you've created an identical copy of the condensate by sending a laser pulse across an optical fiber.

Notes:

They aren't converting the mass of the atoms in the first condensate into the energy of the laser pulse. There is no energy/mass conversion.

The information is likely within a single laser pulse, not any sort of series of pulses. The transmission of this information is nothing like conventional transmission of information going on over telecom fiber.

Science never makes sense until in ends up in a consumer product, then it suddenly becomes common knowledge. :-)

If they will put the second condensate in Scarlett Johansson's shower, I'm willing to try the -273c part. :p

Two reasons that this doesn't make any sense to me:

1. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Basically, they're saying that they are destroying the atoms (by whatever means they are using) and then recreating it at another point.

2. Are they really transmitting this via data? As in, are they really taking that atom, digitizing it and then sending the data to another point where the data stream is really, re-materialized in some kind of chamber?

Are they certain that they are "teleporting," this atom via a data transmission, or did they just happen across a different means of physically transferring small particals through a particular substrate?

I apologize if nothing I say makes any sense...it is late, and I am sleepy.

This isn't teleporting in any way, is completely different from the method used in Star Trek and pretty much any other sci-fi story. I wish media would stop using that word.

Teleporting means you actually physically move the object. Not just copy it. The majority of sci-fi describes teleporting as involving moving atoms via some method of changing them to energy. This is naturally destructive but it's accepted by the characters because it's the same atoms at the other end. I do recall one story that used lasers to measure the state of every particle in a body, and used tachyons to transmit the measurements through space, and the body was reconstructed at the other end, but I can't recall if the tachyons themselves were converted atoms or just a data communication medium.

All they're really doing here is finding a way to measure with extreme precision the quantum state of the atoms and imposing that state on another condensate so that it forms back into a copy of it.

It's not clear from that article what "signal" they're actually sending over the fiber (too many ellipses). Are they using a measuring device to receive the reflected laser energy or something else, sending that to a computer, then transmitting it, or is the signal actually the raw laser light passing into the fiber after being modified by the interaction with the condensate? If the former, then they could record and reproduce the signal. If the latter, technically it's still measuring the quantum state, it's just that the only way to actually read the measurement is by imposing it on the other end (although presumably you could create a sensor to record it).

This COULD very well be the precursor to a synthesizer that can create virtually anything. Food synthesis, clothes, anything that you could first scan, you could then reconstruct as many times as you wanted, if it's actually possible to record the signal. I don't know if the benefits of that would outweigh the bad things -- food for everyone, standard of living improved globally, but suddenly people put out of work, things that are unique could be duplicated so they're less special, etc. Some sci-fi of course gets by that by just saying you can't record the signal and reproduce it, but then some such as Star Trek blatantly contradict themselves on that matter.

Somehow I doubt it'll actually become anything of significant use. The extreme temperature seems to be an absolute requirement, the only way to get the atoms to behave in a way that allows the laser signal to be created. Beyond that, there's the matter of speed. Anything at a normal temperature would need to be scanned almost instantaneously and completely, otherwise the particles wouldn't be transmitted in their same positions and with the same energy. Unless we could find some sort of energy field that could be erected to suddenly halt every particle without breaking their interaction and allowing their energy to be restored at the other end, this is kind of a dealbreaker.

It's also not clear, do the atoms in the condensate at the other end have to be of the same elements? Does it have to be pure? Or does turning it into a condensate result in the ability to perform alchemy and the atoms transform from lead to gold just by imposing the state of the original gold atoms on it? If the elements have to be matched, that'd again be a pretty major issue. Certainly it would never allow us to do a lot of space travel, since you'd have to stock pile all the various elements at every receiving station to be able to recreate things, and you could never ever use it for the first trip to any place.

So basically, it's a neat experiment, but probably will never have any practical application. I kind of resent that things like this get represented in a way that makes it seem like they're going to revolutionize the world, when really it's just a toy. It seems like a waste of time and money for them to be working on being able to do something like this, instead of researching avenues that might have some actual potential to be useful. I'm not against science for the sake of knowledge really, everything doesn't have to be practical to be worth learning, but it seems obvious that even if this is actually doing what they say, and could be turned into a functional device, real application of it would require technology we won't have for a very long time.

Dr. Malcom Betruger unavailable for comment.

has any lab in the world ever successfully achieved cooling at absolute zero?!? last time i heard... it was only -272.16 or probably lower

heh....I'm not going to be the first one to try this, anyone remember watching the original Stargate movie :P