First off, Happy Birthday Canada! Your faithful and intrepid science reporter (me!) is a very proud Canadian, and loves his country very much. If he could, he would give his country a hug, and buy it a beer.

Patriotic squee aside, it’s SCIENCE TIME!

First off, in the world of very bleeding edge computer hardware, IBM has successfully worked out the bugs in phase change memory (PCM) and has a demo that has been running for five months now, so they are pretty sure they got it down.

PCM is a way of storing information by exploiting the way that the electrical resistance of some materials changes when its state changes. In this case, the material is a form of crystal that has a very high resistance when in a solid, crystalline form but a much lower resistance when uncrystallized and amorphous.

So the information would be stored via changed the state of zillions of little crystalline cells.

Well, so what? The upshot of all this technicality is that if you can get PCM working, you get a form of non-volatile memory (keeps its information even without power, like Flash memory) that has incredible speed and information density.

This could lead to a whole host of super fast high capacity devices that could kick off a computing revolution. Imagine computers that boot instantly! Then again, they have been promising that for a while.

And of course, this being bleeding edge stuff, we are a long long way from practical applications.

But hey, the future is looking pretty cool!

Going even further out onto the bleeding edge into where it possibly borders onto the lunatic fringe, we have the guy behind video game on demand system OnLive claiming, in a casual and offhand way, that he has a brand new wireless communication technology that violates the laws of physics.

What do you think of that, Scotty?

Exactly. Ye cannae deny the laws of physics, laws of physics, laws of physics!

Now the frustrating thing is that this dude, Steve Perlman, did not call a press conference, hand out smartly designed and highly detailed press packets explaining it all, and then announce this particular scientific revolution with a full presentation and a thorough Q and A session afterwards.

No, he just let it drop in the middle of a longer presentation about something else, like it was no big deal and he could not imagine it causing a fuss.

“Oh, and by the way, I have a new wireless technology called DIDO that would completely revolutionize the way wireless data transfer works, using towers that are no bigger than a router and allowing every user in a tower’s range to use the tower’s full speed at any time, all while going right through objects that would normally block wireless reception. Moving on. ”

According to the eggheads, what he is proposing is not exactly impossible, but it flies in the face of what is known about how wireless works right now, and so they are rating it as “not bloody likely”.

I just like the idea of casually dropping some scientific bombshell while talking about something far more dull and prosaic and technical.

“Interesting side note, I obtained the level of detail on these slides of the wing patterns on the Lower Delta Swamp Moth by inventing a photographic technique that slows down light till it goes backwards in time. Now moving on to the Upper Delta Swamp Moth…. ”

Finally, moving on beyond the lunatic fringe to that sacred island of honor and madness known as Japan, we have…. yes, you guessed it, kids…. something really amazingly creepy.

In this case, it’s a hyper realistic robot mannequin designed to let dental student practices on something that looks human in a creepy ass way and actually realistically winces and yells in pain.

And oh yes…. there is video.

I love the narrator’s voice. It’s distinctly Japanese sounding, and yet his English is perfectly clear and easy to understand. It’s the perfect balance.

Oh, and fun fact : in order to get a really realistic mouth, tongue, and jaw for their robot dental patient, the makers of the robot had to turn to the people who are the current world leaders in such things : the makers of hyper realistic “love dolls”.

That explains why it’s a female patient. I bet hyper realistic male sex dolls are a decade behind in sophistication due to perceived lack of demand.

Not that I would want one. Not unless they make one that can also engage in intellectually stimulating conversation with me after.