Memristor

This is relatively old news in the geek department, but here goes:
On April 30, 2008, HP Labs found the fourth circuit element called the memristor, which stands for "memory resistor". It has been theorized for around 37 years before the discovery, but HP's memristor is the first actual memristor made. The device could have multiple different applications in computer hardware, such as  traditional RAM, hard drives and processors, and also transistors as a more specific usage. It also has the potential to be far more energy efficient as RAM thanks to the fact that information written to it is not volatile, while maintaining similar if not higher speeds. The memristor also has the capability to emulate the workings of a human brain - hello, AI! In other words, the memristor has the potential to change the computing world as we know it.

Courtesy innovativeblood.blogspot.com and NewScientist

Hynix Semiconductor and HP are working together to make the memristor mass production ready, and they estimate its release to be within three years. Right now, HP is working on R&D for the memristor, making it smaller and faster. When it was first found in 2008, it had a switching operation of only about 1 Hz. The most recent announcement tells us that in April 2010 - 2 years after the initial finding - HP have memristors of size 3nm by 3nm operating at around 1GHz - a billion times the initial speed. At even this early stage in development, it could rival current SSD technologies, the full potential of some of which are already bottlenecked by typical SATA connectors. Prices of memristor storage at launch are expected to be much lower than those of SSDs, with multiple times the data density (more storage).

For more in depth info on memristors, look it up on Wikipedia - they have most of the latest updates about memristors compiled there.