You might think your 1TB of storage is a ton. And it is! But it's got nothing on what IBM is cooking up: a 120 petabyte storage setup, the largest ever.

The age of flash memory might be nearing a close even before those sexy SSDs really hit the mainstream market, as IBM has just announced that they've figured out a way to make phase-change memory a commercial reality within five years. What's in it for you? Well, how does accessing your data about a hundred times faster sound?

50 years ago today, Alan Shepard, America's first astronaut, and the then-newly-formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (or NASA to you and me) achieved an important milestone for the U.S. space program: America's first manned spaceflight. The effort is often talked about in terms of the people involved, or the spacecraft that made it possible. Alan Shepard, for instance, is rightfully regarded as a national hero, and the humble Redstone rocket that carried him into sub-orbit is an iconic reminder of that first flight. There's a crucial component that also played a massive role, however, a young technology at the time that rarely gets its due considering how important it was: the computer.

Now that IBM's Watson supercomputer has proved itself to be better than humans at Jeopardy, it's time to put it to work in a more productive setting: the healthcare industry.