There’s a word for making furniture out of mushrooms: biofabrication. Bio means life. Fabricate means make. Combined, those words perfectly describe something more and more scientists are experimenting with. Toadstool stools are just the beginning of their work! Thanks to biofabrication, you soon may be able to. . .

. . . compost your shoes in the sink. A new kind of Adidas athletic shoe has a weird main ingredient: spider silk. Don’t like the idea of spider webs surrounding your toes? If it makes you feel better, the silk is synthetic. People made it out of living, fermented bacteria. After about two years of heavy use, owners can pour a packet of enzyme solution on the super-lightweight, spider silk shoes. The shoes will disintegrate in just a few hours!

. . . sit on a leather couch that didn’t come from a cow. We’re not talking about pleather (fake leather made from polyurethane). We mean breathable, soft, flexible leather. It is identical to tanned cowhide. A company called Modern Meadow makes this leather from collagen proteins. These come from living animal cells. Workers at Modern Meadow arrange the collagen in the same pattern found in real leather.

. . . print new body parts. Sometimes, people need a bone or an organ replaced because of sickness or injury. When that happens, doctors use donated replacements. But what if they could instead use a patient’s own cells to 3D print whatever he or she needed? Patients would probably avoid infections and bad reactions that can come from transplanting another person’s parts. People can already go to school to study body-part printing. When will ready-printed organs arrive? No one is sure. Some scientists hope to see it happen in 50 years.