A few enterprising researchers at MIT have come up with an invention that could only have ever come out of a college setting; a machine that takes stacks of acrylic disks and uses heat and pressure to form them instantly into bowls and plates of varying depth and shape. They call it the DishMaker.

The DishMaker is a prototype device and nowhere near a production stage where you can pick one up for your kitchen from your local appliance store, but the inventors hope that by using recyclable and reusable acrylic disks to form the plates and bowls, eventually the DishMaker will allow you to store years' worth of dishes in stacks of acrylic that keep easily in a small box or in a fraction of the cabinet space of your fine china. Also, since the acrylic can be formed again and reformed using the same heat and pressure that made it, the dishes created by the DishMaker can be used over and over again. The inventors claim that one acrylic dish can be reused a thousand times using a fraction of the energy used to create a normal ceramic dish.

There's no provision in the invention yet to clean used dishes, so you're still stuck washing them before reusing them in the DishMaker, recycling them, or just keeping them, but we can only hope that future versions might wash as well as create dishes. [via Gizmodo]