The popular crime TV show, CSI: NY, recently featured a 3D printer in an episode. In this sequence, CSI Detective Mac Taylor in white lab coat is using a powder-based 3D printer to reproduce a bullet apparently embedded in a horse, in order to identify the bullet. (Who writes this stuff???)
We suppose one could actually do this, but probably there are better ways to identify a bullet. Maybe Mac should just look at the 3D model instead?
Via YouTube
CSI:NY consistently has inaccurate uses of "real" science & technology. They often take newsworthy tech and shoe-horn it into the plot in ways that require the technology to function in a radically different way than it actually does. Frequently, the version of tech that appears on the show is _impossible_. Hand held electromagnets that can move objects across the room, non-contact sensors that can find a lead bullet inside a rat 20 yards inside a crawl space (full of lead pipes), etc.
That's not even counting the legal admissibility a printed _copy_ of a bullet would have in a case.
CSI:NY- They get their science wrong, they get their tech wrong, they get their law wrong. Do they hire any advisors at all?