The New Scientist used to have a column inside the back page called Daedalus. It usually described some kind of weird or wonderful "invention" that probably wasn't practical. One of them was for street lighting: you'd have pairs of ultraviolet lasers on either side of the street, intersecting in mid-air. The pairs of lasers would have frequencies that were not exactly the same, so that at the point of intersection lower-frequency "beats" would occur. If the frequency of the beats were adjusted to match the excitation energy of (e.g.) O2, the oxygen would emit light.
Another Daedalus "invention" I remember was to use plant tropins to control the growth of wood. You could then grow e.g. an armchair, or a table, or even a house. No glue needed, no saw needed.
I don't know who used to write that column.