In a small industrial building at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a 20-foot fiber draw tower is steadily pulling a strand of plastic and winding it around a large spool. To the untrained eye, it looks like an ordinary thread, but the fibers made at Lincoln Laboratory’s newly opened Defense Fabric Discovery Center (DFDC) are anything but ordinary. The end-to-end prototyping facility is equipped to design and produce fabrics that can change color, store energy, emit and detect light, monitor health, or facilitate communication.