Marc Abraham's Ignobel Prizes is the latest book in a series that seeks to highlight some of the strangest scientific research papers to be published. From the founder of the esteemed Annals of Improbable Research (www.improbable.com), the Ignobel Prizes award scientists for some truly bizarre work, including the research into dunking biscuits (see How to Dunk a Donut).

Just over four months on from our massive hard drive roundup (October 2002, page 74), and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks have finally arrived. Phew.

Offering 40GB of storage, the Iomega drive is very small for its capacity, measuring a mere 8.89 x 7.37 x 1.27cm. It weighs just over 99 grams, which means it's unnoticeable in your pocket. The internal drive is a 40GB Hitachi TravelStar C4K40 -- a new form-factor hard drive, measuring a mere 1.8 inches across (a normal notebook hard drive is 2.5in, a desktop drive 3.5) -- and only about 7mm thick.

While 64-bit computing has been around for a while (for the two of you who could afford Intel's Itanium, and now Itanium II processors), the dream of 64-bittery for the humble home system has been a long time coming.