Growing up there were certain technologies that always fired my imagination. When I was in the first grade my next door neighbor and I took an old refrigerator box and magic markers and made a mockup of a mainframe computer. I remember it had a crude drawing of a reel-to-reel tape drive on the outside of the box. Inside we drew what we imagined circuits would look like. We made up adventures going into the mainframe to fix some problem. We played with that box until it was completely destroyed.

Of course we were also big fans of the Six Million Dollar Man. I still can't get enough of that intro:

Does it get any better than the techo-triumphalism of that monologue?

Gentleman, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.

Seriously, I get goosebumps. So yeah, this is pretty cool:

Kuniholm and his fellow engineers at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, or APL, are at work on the most ambitious prosthetics project in history. They seek the field's holy grail -- to build an artificial human arm that acts, looks and feels to its user like his native arm, and to do it with astonishing speed by the end of 2009.

It's a more modest goal than creating a superhero, but it's a far cry from hooks and pegs legs.

I was grown by the time Back to the Future II came out, but everyone loves Marty McFly's Mattel Hoverboard and Doc Brown's flying Delorean. When people think about flying cars, they're really thinking about levitation, not an automated airplane. But is there any reason to think that this scene might one day be possible?

We might not have to wait until 2015 for a hoverboard after all, as scientists at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have succeeded in making levitation a reality. By using an already existing lens to reverse what is known as the Casimir Effect, physicists Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin have managed to make a force which repels instead of attracting.

The Casimir force works at the quantum level, where energy fluctuations can have a huge effect on particle attraction. In theory the new force can be scaled up to levite people, although at first it is likely to be used as a kind of non-stick coating inside circuits.

Its not a Hooverboard, but we shouldn't be too dismissive of non-stick circuitry. This development could give us a few more years of Moore's law before the next paradigm kicks in.