Here’s this week’s dose of cheerful futurism, in the form of the “Next Five in Five” report from IBM, which lists five innovations that the Big Blue crew believe will occur within the next five years. You’ll need to click through for the details, but here are the hooks:

• We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
• Real-time speech translation-once a vision only in science fiction-will become the norm
• There will be a 3-D Internet
• Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance
• Our mobile phones will come close to reading our minds

Not really all that implausible, are they? Things move fast these days, and five years is a long time in technological terms. We’ll just have to wait and see, though. [FutureWire]