He bought his daughter a fifty-cent plastic prize from a gumball-type machine.

NEWYORKER: The General��s Dilemma

The operating room itself contained a maze of plastic piping that twisted though the air between the heart-and-lung machine and the operating table.

NEWYORKER: The Operator

Lillehei solved that problem with cross-circulation, in which a donor, linked to the patient by plastic hose and a simple pump, acted as a living heart-lung machine.

FORBES: Brave heart

Also on view are four of his recent "Extrusion" benches, made without nuts and bolts by squeezing red-hot aluminum out of a machine as one might pinch toothpaste out of a plastic tube.

WSJ: In New York, the Work of Thomas Heatherwick

While the BlackBerry's plastic keyboard and tight integration with corporate e-mail systems makes it an unbeatable e-mail machine, Nielsen Mobile's first-quarter data show that the iPhone is all about multimedia, playing music, video and online games far above the average usage of those services for other mobile phone users.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Some of these are then fed into a prototyping machine, made by Objet of Israel, that can produce a 3-D model in lightweight plastic in minutes.

WSJ: Whirlpool Designer Patrick Schiavone | Creating