Carbon3D said its "game-changing" process could make objects such as car parts, medical devices or shoes. The technique was inspired by the film Terminator 2, in which the T-1000 robot rises from a pool of metallic liquid.

"The soft machine looks rather intelligent and [can] deform itself according to the space it voyages in – just like [the] Terminator does from the science-fiction film," Jing Liu from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China told The New Scientist.

So who’s going to protect us from the real-life rise of the machines? Step forward a little-known body called the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). CSER is based at the University of Cambridge, and is a multidisciplinary group of individuals – mainly scientists – whose mission, as defined on their website, is “the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction”.CSER was set up with funding from Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, which arguably makes him the real-life John Connor, making a lone stand against the real-life Skynets.

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“It is very possible that Terminator of the future would need to be constructed starting from such building blocks.”

Like it or not, science fiction is becoming science fact. The Terminator was, of course, a work of fiction, but the idea of cyborgs and killer machines is not all that farfetched.  In fact, the danger is becoming so real that the Obama Administration found the need to spell out explicit rules that specify under what circumstances machines are allowed to kill humans.

The team showed that if the polymer is broken or damaged, once the damaged parts are placed together and the healing process starts, electrical conductivity is almost completely restored within about 15 seconds.

Many scientists are concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole. Such dangers have been suggested from progress in AI, from developments in biotechnology and artificial life, from nanotechnology, and from possible extreme effects of anthropogenic climate change. via Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

We are a risk-averse society. But there's a mismatch between public perception of very different risks and their actual seriousness.

Risk of robot uprising wiping out human race to be studied