Here's something that sounds like humanity taking steps towards making science fiction into reality. Think star-trek, think of the machine that is able to synthesize things, for example, food. Today I found this post on slashdot that looks like a steps towards making that a possibility.Hod Lipson and team have developed a rapid prototyping fabricator that can "print" blue prints into 3 dimensional object. Not 3D images - objects. It's called "Fab at Home".
See a video interview for demo. To encourage users, they've even started a wiki that allows users to post the results of their experiments with the kit. The design for this 3D printer is open source and they are encouraging people to make use of it.
For more details, visit their website Fab@Home.