Teleportation only a matter of time

Well, that's being a bit optimistic. BUT, scientists have demonstrated "Long Distance Teleportation Between Atoms" [PDF].

For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing.

The New York Times has more. It's not very efficient yet:

The method is not particularly practical at the moment, because it fails almost all of the time. Only 1 of every 100 million teleportation attempts succeed, requiring 10 minutes to transfer one bit of quantum information.

“We need to work on that,” Dr. Monroe said.

But he said that a success rate of just 1 in 10,000 would be high enough for some uses. Such systems could be used as “quantum repeaters” — reading the information from one photon and then imprinting it on a new photon for the next leg of its communications journey.