Author name: Kathryn Hulick

In fairy tales, a wizard waves a magic wand and poof! There’s a carriage or a cake or a pair of shoes. We don’t have magic wands, and probably never will. But we do have 3D printers. A 3D printer can’t make something out of nothing. But it can create just about anything you can imagine. Feed one a design for an object, and it will print that object. You just have to give it a raw material to print with. Many 3D printers are small machines—around the size of a microwave oven—so they can be carried anywhere.