Tick off one more item from the long list of Star Trek inventions that make it into the real world:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/ ... s-a-taste/

I don't think there's a working prototype yet, but NASA is involved so expect to have one in your kitchens in the near future...

Two more things (warp drive/teleportation) to realize and we'll be living in the 24th century!

Very nice thing they got going! Too bad it'll take a few decades to perfect the technology and a few more to hit the market, where any common person could buy it. By the time a replicator as we know it from modern Star Trek will be on the shelf with a price tag attached to it, we'll probably be either dead or too old to care anymore. But I do sincerely hope to be wrong on this one!

I beg to differ. 3D printers are out there right now, albeit a bit expensive for the time being, so the only question is how to convert them from shooting plastic to shooting sugars/proteins etc. After that, the only 2 things are 1) make the printed food look nice and make 100% sure it's safe for human consumption, 2) make it cheap enough.

In any case, I guess the military and (obviously) NASA will be the ones who are most interested for obvious reasons.

You're right; 3D printers are out there, but at the moment they are incapable of doing what the Star Trek replicators do. I don't expect them to, either. Not yet, anyway. It is my belief however that such replicators will arrive earlier than Roddenberry might have expected in his vision of the future.
I'm just saying that such machines will not be available to the general public anytime soon. It usually takes a whole lot of time even for a technology that's proven its worth to be implemented on a large scale. Take for example the retinal scanner or the fingerprinting scanner: they have been around for a lot of time, but you still need to buy a lock and hope that a potential burgler won't have a matching key or enough will to crack it open. Unless you're very rich, you won't buy a retinal scanner for your house door and you still open your car using a key, you make monetary transactions using your credit card and you have a plastic identity card which can be easily stolen or lost.
All of those could be eliminated if retinal scanning were implemented on a large scale. That's where I'm disappointed: that new, life-improving technologies are not being used, when they should.

hi catlain,
its also good that retinal scanning is not that popular... eg would you want a burgler to break in and steal your stuff..
or would you prefer he first removes an eye, and then uses it to break in?

Hey, Pauluk! There's no way he could remove one of my eyes and then break into my house, since I'm inside the house, and he can't get in, so it's all safe.