Spooked

clipped from www.technologyreview.com European scientists have broken a distance record for sending quantum information from one place to another, paving the way for a system that relies on the laws of physics to provide communications that can't be tapped. If they can extend the reach of their signal a little further, they'll be able to use satellites to send perfectly secure data around the world. To create the key, the team first had to create pairs of entangled photons. Entanglement, which Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," means that the fate of one photon is tied up with the fate of the other. Measuring any quantum mechanical property of one photon automatically changes that same property in its entangled partner, no matter the distance between them.