There’s a great story in this week’s Nature about Fab Lab, the fabrication laboratory created by Neil Gershenfeld of MIT’s Media Lab to teach people with little technical knowledge how to fabricate things like simple circuits and other devices. Since it began as an undergraduate class at MIT eight years ago, Fab Labs have popped up in several international locations, like Ghana (where children learned to cobble together circuits), India and South Africa. Consisting of cutting and milling machines and computers that run them, people have made all sorts of useful devices for everyday life.

Teaching people how to use the equipment and finding funding for the labs have been challenges. But it goes to show that you can give anyone, not just MIT students in Cambridge, some tools and a little know-how and they can show that innovation, invention and engineering aren’t just the domain of engineers.