A team in the US has built a teleporter capable of sending the state of ytterbium ions from one side of the lab to the other; something that until now had only been possible with photons. The team say the technique could dramatically increase the distance over which quantum information can be sent.

The U.S. Air Force has funded a study to examine possible ways to teleport humans and objects through space. Critics argue that funding studies into teleportation are a waste of money for now because of the tremendous energy and computation requirements.

Thanks to lab experiments, there is growth in the number of teleportation believers, but there is an equal amount of disbelief, too. In his new book, David Darling argues "one way or another, teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures. It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers, which will themselves radically change the world."

The U.S. Air Force has commissioned the Teleportation Physics Study of teleportation of material objects. The study considered teleportation by psychic means, by altering the properties of the spacetime vacuum or spacetime metric, by quantum entanglement, and by transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes.

Physicists in Austria and the US have independently demonstrated quantum teleportation with atoms for the first time. Until now, teleportation had only ever been observed with photons. The results could represent a major step towards building a large-scale quantum computer.

Two teams of scientists report today that for the first time they have teleported individual atoms, taking characteristics of one atom and imprinting them on a second.

Scientists in Australia have applied a ghostly phenomenon called quantum entanglement to dismantle a signal - transmitted in photons, or particles of light - in one shaft of laser light and instantaneously rebuild a replica of it in a second laser beam.

Australian scientists said Monday they had successfully "teleported" a laser beam encoded with data, breaking it up and reconstructing an exact replica a yard away.

The dream of teleporting atoms and molecules - and maybe even larger objects - has become a real possibility for the first time. The advance is thanks to physicists who have suggested a method that in theory could be used to "entangle" absolutely any kind of particle.

Scientists have made the hard part of teleportation happen ?in a lab in Denmark. But don't expect people or objects to be physically taken apart and recreated as they are on the Enterprise. Instead, it is information about this matter that's being moved from one place to the other.