The Top 10 Everything of 2009

Inching our reality ever closer to Star Trek's, scientists at the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute successfully teleported data from one atom to another in a container a meter away. A landmark in the brain-bending field known as quantum information processing, the experiment doesn't quite have the cool factor of body transportation; one atom merely transforms the other so it acts just like the first. Still, atom-to-atom teleportation has major implications for creating supersecure, ultra-fast computers.