My mind was just blown by a talk from Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Bits and Atoms lab at MIT. His team created the fab lab. Here are  some notes

• This is a house created by a fab lab: http://www.fablabhouse.com/en
• This is a wireless network created out of junk in Afghanistan: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125866561
• This is a next-generation learning environment he created because schools like MIT and Stanford cannot scale http://www.fabacademy.org/, and kids are now doing advanced material fabrication at fab labs around the world
• The only current US representative who was previously a scientist recently authored a bill for a national fab lab: http://scripts.mit.edu/~emu/fab/?p=2196
• Fab labs can create the machinery required to create fab labs. There are currently 100 around the world. That number doubles every year.