Can your cellphone check your blood sugar? What does a wireless BandAid do? Is my pill networked? Can a videogame cure cancer? Will a robot care for my mom? Can an iPhone save my life?

And, of course, does synthetic skin feel gross?

The answer to the last question is yes, but it is also pretty astonishing to touch, as noted in one of the many tech-heavy talks at TEDMED, the medical and health-care conference, which has returned after a five-year hiatus, to Hotel Coronado near San Diego.

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Actor Ashton Kutcher crossed the million-follower-on-Twitter line at 11:12 p.m. PDT, beating CNN.

Kutcher simply tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!

The CNN cable news channel passed the million mark soon after, but was still second.

The race was getting close as midnight neared on the West Coast.

Not a real race, but a race of the Twits.

Kutcher vs. CNN was a race to get one million “followers,” those who sign up to receive a person’s or organization’s tweets on the hot microblogging service.

Now, I am worried about what Kutcher–whose Twitter handle is aplusk–will do with his one million minions. Order us all to play idiotic practical jokes on people? Rent Demi Moore movies, even the unwatchable ones (”G.I. Jane” anyone?), over and over? Get 1970s mullets?

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We consider Jill Sobule to be the musical muse of ATD–which we desperately need since we are obviously way, way too jacked into the matrix.

And, tomorrow, Sobule’s Internet-funded album, “California Years,” produced by the legendary Don Was, debuts. I urge everyone to click the link here and get a copy–online, of course.

Let’s cheer on efforts like Sobule’s and hope for a hit. Because hers is indeed a small but mighty effort, as all kinds of content creators try to figure out businesses in the new digital age, unafraid of the changes inevitably coming (AP might want to take notes about this).

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As BoomTown reported earlier today, AOL was abuzz with the rumors that former execs from the online service’s glory days, including still controversial former CEO Steve Case, might make an appearance at a huge staff pep rally called by its new CEO Tim Armstrong.

And so Case did show up in front of a cheering crowd this morning, along with former AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis.

Considering that many at Time Warner, which owns AOL, still harbor resentment towards Case about the disastrous merger between it and AOL a half-decade ago, the move is groundbreaking for the troubled online service and perhaps a sign that it is finally time to move forward.

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BoomTown has finally gotten used to the silly gee-gaws television networks use on election night, like touchscreen maps and drawing all over the screen and jump-up numbers.

But one used by cable network CNN last night–a hologram of a various people beamed into the studio to look like they were right there with Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper–was downright freaky.

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Although we did not raid the offices of Silicon Alley Insider and “steal” Peter Kafka, as the fanciful SAI kingpin Henry Blodget alleges–had it been a raid, BoomTown would have properly hog-tied Blodget so he could not make such spurious allegations!–it is true that SAI’s current managing editor (pictured here) will be coming to work for us at AllThingD.com soon.

He will write a daily still-unnamed new media blog from New York City, starting at the end of October.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 3 of 4 of an interview I did with Time Warner’s CEO Jeff Bewkes.

As you will see, Bewkes is a live wire, sassing me about the hard time I was giving him about the rough road AOL has had as a Time Warner property.

In this video, Bewkes takes questions from the audience about CNN, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, Bebo, content, the greening of Time Warner and he also gets in a stats tussle with Yahoo’s media head Scott Moore.

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OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?
With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.
You know, the new pretty young thing in [...]

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Yesterday, you could feel the testiness jump right over the phone from several people close to Microsoft whom I spoke to about Yahoo’s latest gambit to sell its blue-sky growth plan to Wall Street.

Like a lot of Yahoo’s various moves of late–dating promiscuously with other suitors, handing out pricey severance plans to all employees and continuing to spurn the advances of the software giant without a raise in its $31-a-share bid–the projections by Yahoo that its sunny future warranted at least $40 a share were not taken well in Redmond.

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