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I know it sounds seriously "wierd", but that really is the way the universe works at the scale of very, very small things. Einstein hated quantum mechanics - he once famously said "God doesn't throw dice". Lots of modern electronic devices, though, rely on quantum tunnelling to work, so it's a very "real" effect (it's also how things like radioactive decay "work"). The problem is that it generally only works over distance scales of the order of nanometres. If these guys at MIT really have found a way to make it work at a scale of metres, as they say, it'll be a breakthrough with absolutely revolutionary practical applications.
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