A coalition of academics and tinkerers are working on cheap three-dimensional printers or desktop manufacturing plants. Their long-term goal is to create a machine that is able to fix itself and, ultimately, to replicate.

Researchers have created a primordial soup that works like a digital DNA factory, where T-shaped "codons" swim in a computer-generated virtual liquid forming single, double, and even triple strands. Like DNA, these digital particles "can be assembled into patterns that encode" information, claims robotics scientist Peter Turney. Given sufficient time, a soup of separated individual particles will "spontaneously form self-replicating patterns."

Drawing heavily on the biology of insects and bacteria, researchers from Humboldt University in Germany have devised a way for electronic agents to efficiently assemble a network without relying on a central plan.

The best minds in electricity R&D have a plan: Every node in the power network of the future will be awake, responsive, adaptive, price-smart, eco-sensitive, real-time, flexible, humming - and interconnected with everything else.