Watch out, Adam Smith

Dave Justus updates on what those wacky scientists at Cornell have been up to as of late: a home manufacturing system dubbed "the fabber."

The standard version of their Freeform fabricator – or “fabber” – is about the size of a microwave oven and can be assembled for around $2400 (£1200). It can generate 3D objects from plastic and various other materials. Full documentation on how to build and operate the machine, along with all the software required, are available on the Fab@Home website, and all designs, documents and software have been released for free.

I strongly suspect that this is the beginning of something that will tranform our economies and our lives at least as much as personal computers have. Bring it on I say.

This is going to be so cool for so many reasons, if anything now I can build my own spitting LLama USB memory stick. I mean, it won't be hilariously inappropriate as this, but what would be, really?