KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Carrie moves objects with her mind. Wolverine’s skin heals instantly. And Darth Vader and Batman use lightsabers and grappling guns.

Only in the movies?

Not anymore. Hold on to your comic books, nerds. Science “fiction” is becoming science “fact.”

Today, more than ever, life is imitating art as fictional gadgets and abilities once the exclusive province of superheroes and telekinetic teens are sparking innovation in the real world.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers Dan Novy and Sophia Brueckner teach a class called “Pulp to Prototype,” where science fiction is required reading to get students thinking about possibilities that seem far-fetched.

At the University of Minnesota, physics professor James Kakalios found success with the freshman course “Everything I Know About Science I Learned From a Comic Book” and went on to write the popular science book “The Physics of Superheroes.”

After watching an X-Men movie, students at Stanford University grew fascinated by Wolverine’s rapidly healing skin.

“My students are frequently inspired by science fiction,” said Zhenan Bao, their chemical engineering professor. “They said, ‘We should make this.’ I said, ‘That’s very interesting. No one has done that before.’ So we figured out a way.”

So, what things from science fiction actually are real?

Try these.

The lightsaber

At the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, physics professors have coaxed photons to bind together to form molecules — a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. Harvard’s Mikhail Lukin and MIT’s Vladan Vuletic described their work last month in the journal Nature.

“It’s not an inapt analogy to compare this to lightsabers,” Lukin said. “The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.”

Now don’t go all Luke Skywalker on us. This doesn’t mean you could buy an actual lightsaber to bring with you to “Star Wars: Episode VII” in 2015. But it does prove that the science behind it is possible — at least in a lab on a subatomic scale.

Captain America’s shield

At the University of Delaware, chemical engineering professor Norm Wagner has developed a substance that repels knife attacks and absorbs vibrations.

“It’s said to be very close to the fictional material Vibranium, which makes up Captain America’s shield,” said Kakalios.

Kevlar can stop bullets but not a jab by a knife or ice pick. After adding Wagner’s substance — which flows like a gooey liquid but turns hard (like cornstarch and water) when struck by a force — it can.

Rapidly healing skin

Using a thin plastic containing tiny metal particles, Stanford chemical engineering students created a stretchable synthetic skin that conducts electricity, can sense touch like human skin and heals itself.

No, you can’t use it to instantly heal wounds like a mutant. But the revolutionary skin could be used in high-tech bandages to help monitor a patient’s health. It also could be used in products such as smart watches, where electronics have to conform to a curved surface.

“If you get a crack in it, or if it gets cut in half, it can heal itself,” Bao said. “It’s engineered with both strong and weak chemical bonds. This gives the molecules its self-healing properties.”

Warp drive

When speed is what it needs, Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise goes into warp drive, zooming faster than light.

Cool, but impossible, right?

Believe it or not — and plenty of his contemporaries don’t — Harold “Sonny” White, a physicist with NASA’s Johnson Space Center, thinks it is possible to build a warp drive that wouldn’t violate the laws of physics.

Based on a warp drive proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, White’s design involves a football-shaped spaceship encircled by a large ring.

White, who has said signed agreements limit how much he can say, discussed his idea with Clara Moskowitz, assistant managing editor of Space.com:

“This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind,” Moskowitz wrote. “Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn’t being warped at all.”

Think of it as an interstellar loophole. While nothing can travel faster than light, space-time (called the fabric of space) is not subject to such a cosmic speed limit. By “warping” space-time, White believes, a ship effectively could travel at 10 times the speed of light.

“There is hope,” White told an audience last year. He now is experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in his lab.