Water from Air could produce enough daily water for a family of four.

A new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are promising something that seems too good to be true. They say they can make food out of thin air. But that's exactly how certain soil-dwelling bacteria work. In nature, they survive on a meager diet of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor drawn directly from the atmosphere. In the lab, they do the same, eating up waste carbon and reproducing so enthusiastically that their populations swell to fill massive fermentation tanks.

A strange and powerful collaborator is waiting for you. Offer it just a few words, and it will create an original scene, based on your description. The results can be astonishing: crisp, beautiful, fantastical and sometimes eerily realistic. But they can also be muddy and grotesque: warped faces, gobbledygook street signs and distorted architecture. Keep scrolling to learn step by step how the process unfolds.

Artificial intelligence is getting better and better at creating generative images, and now scientists are working at generative video. The idea is that simply by typing out a phrase, artificial intelligence could create a video of that scene. Scientists at Duke and Princeton have created a working model. "Video generation is intimately related to video prediction," the authors say in their new paper. Video prediction, in which A.I attempts to predict what actions come next in a video, has long been a goal for researchers.

It's one of the most iconic scenes in all of science fiction: In the original Star Wars, the droid R2-D2 projects a 3-D image onto a tabletop. Princess Leia, projected as a tiny hologram, desperately asks the semi-retired Jedi master Ben Kenobi for assistance: "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Still brings the chills, doesn't it? The free-standing 3-D hologram has been a staple of science fiction for decades. But like the phaser and the flying car, it's one of those sci-fi dreams that has yet to become reality. We're getting awfully close, though. Earlier this summer, researchers at the University of Rochester unveiled the latest projection system to approximate Princess Leia's immortal plea. Dubbed the Illumyn 3-D Display, the system uses laser projection to generate actual 3-D holograms in midair -- no projection surface, no virtual reality goggles, no 3-D glasses, no augmented reality tricks. There is a catch, however: Holograms projected by the Illumyn system are contained within a glass sphere filled with heated Cesium vapor, an elemental metal that's particularly good at emitting light. The Illumyn system works by crossing two laser beams -- invisible to the human eye -- at a specific point within the sphere. When the crossed beams hit the cesium vapor, various atomic-scale shenanigans produce a sky-blue light that is emitted outward in all directions. The crossed beams only produce a single point of light, but by moving the laser coordinates around at incredible speed, the Illumyn sphere can essentially draw 3-D objects in thin air -- well, thin cesium vapors. The image never actually exists at any one time, but the system fires up each dot so fast that the human eye sees the programmed image. The process is actually a kind of high-tech update on the old cathode-ray tube television, says Curtis Broadbent, research associate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester and co-developer of the Illumyn system. "CRT televisions used a raster-scan technology," Broadbent says. "The electron gun sends a stream of electrons to the fluorescent screen and the beam of electrons are deflected to sequentially hit every pixel on the fluorescent screen.

Prolific science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As technology advances, what once was deemed "fantasy" begins to materialize in the world around us. Movies inspire us to have fun with the idea that any sufficiently capable magic is indistinguishable from technology – on-screen magic makes things like teleportation, omnipotent medicine and the creation of objects out of thin air all seem real. In many ways we already live in a future predicted by yesterday's science fiction, with interactive touch devices connected to a vast world of information. These universal machines can support experiences of ever-greater richness and complexity.