About this time every year, reporters (and, of course, our readers) have to suffer through a slew of April Fool's jokes from tech companies, inevitably promising amazing things and then ending with "ha ha just kidding sucks for you!" And it does suck for us, because we get really, really excited about tech that seems too good to be true, and it's always a bummer when it's not. We get all mopey, seriously. Ray buys himself a new cellphone. Kevin feeds himself a milkshake intravenously. And I — well — I just turn all the lights off, lock myself in a closet, and weep. This year, however, we noticed that a bunch of those "ha ha just kidding" moments really weren't, in that some or all of the tech behind the impossible gadgets actually does exist, more or less. So, to make ourselves feel better, we're going to take a look at five of this year's April Fool's tech pranks that could almost, almost be real.

This concept (from NASA and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) is called AMELIA, which stands for Advanced Model for Extreme Lift and Improved Aeroacoustics. There are two relevant bits there: "extreme lift" and "improved aeroacoustics," and both of these things come from mounting jet engines on top of the aircraft's wing instead of underneath.

It doesn't have crazy swept wings and it doesn't fly at Mach 7, but this concept aircraft from Boeing is what we'll all probably be stuffed into by 2045. It runs on cryogenic liquified natural gas, and beats the fuel efficiency by the current generation of passenger jets by a whopping 60%.

Aerospace companies and NASA have been exploring lots of different ways to deal with sonic booms, and most of their designs are similar: long, skinny aircraft with pointy noses designed to "mitigate" the noise problem. Researchers at Tohoku University are trying a completely different and awesomely retro-futuristic idea: a supersonic biplane that eliminates sonic booms entirely.