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After six years of intensive effort, scientists are reporting development of the first commercially viable nanogenerator, a flexible chip that can use body movements - a finger pinch now en route to a pulse beat in the future - to generate electricity. Speaking here today at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, they described boosting the device's power output by thousands times and its voltage by 150 times to finally move it out of the lab and toward everyday life.

We're stumbling through a science fiction wonderland of not just high-flying communications software and tools but of the basic building blocks for the devices we use to do that communicating. The latest contender for radically-improved memory in a computer? Blood. Researchers in Gujarat, India have created a "memristor" -- a portmanteau of memory and resistor -- made of human blood. A resistor is the part of a computer chip that regulates the flow of electricity. Unlike most resistors, a memristor remembers previous levels of voltage and allows for a repeat of that flow.