It’s time for InventHelp’s Invention Girl to let the nerd flag shine! Even as a youngster, I loved the concept of teleportation. Blame it on the old Star Trek episodes I used to watch with my dad when I was a kid.

Today, when I’m sitting in Pittsburgh’s infamous bottleneck traffic, I still fantasize that with a flip of a button, I could be transported across the congested highway directly to the comfort of my desk.

Although it lacks the flair of “Beam me up, Scotty!”, scientists have nonetheless come closer than ever to moving teleportation from science fiction to reality. Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland have invented a way to teleport the quantum identity of one atom to another a few feet away.

Teleportation is a highly complex process involving lasers, quantum physics and a process called “entanglement,” which happens when two particles become “entangled” in a single entity. A change in one instantaneously changes the other – even when the other particle is across the room. Confused yet?

While scientists are still light years away from teleporting anything fun (like me), this concept could be applied to create faster quantum computers. The computers that you and I use today store information in binary code, or a series of ones and zeros. A quantum computer could, theoretically, allow one bit to be both one and zero simultaneously.

So far, the process is not very efficient. Only one of every 100 million teleportation attempts succeeds, and it takes a whopping 10 minutes to transfer one bit of quantum information. But, scientist say, a success rate as low as 1 in 1,000 could prove highly useful if the process can be refined.

Check out this interactive New York Times graphic on Quantum Teleportation. Oh, and “Beam me up, Scotty”! (Sorry, just had to get that out one more time!)

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