Looking for a 12th century chess piece? A custom Rubik's cube? An exact copy of a seashell, the inside of an eyeball, a relief map of an Egyptian burial ground, or an obscure protein?

A scanner in the UAB 3D Print Lab gathers the data needed to turn virtually anything into a printable object. See more examples in this slideshow.
UAB computer scientist Kenneth Sloan, Ph.D., has them all in stock. If you're searching for something else—anything else—he can get it. Or, to be precise, make it. Just give him a day or two, and $20 per cubic inch.

Inside Sloan's lab on the ground floor of Campbell Hall are five 3D printers, ranging from entry level to commercial grade. These magic machines, which recently earned a spot on the cover of Wired magazine, transform computer files into reality. Instead of ink, their "print heads" extrude a thin stream of superheated plastic in layers seven-thousands of an inch thick. Building layer upon layer, a 3D printer can make a nearly infinite variety of objects.