The high school junior says she got the idea after hearing about someone making a dress out of duct tape.
She and her boyfriend began collecting gum wrappers last August. Rasmuson says she quit counting after 200.
Since the wrappers break easily, Rasmuson finished her dress with a vinyl top coat.
The oddity, which looks like a crystal ball, had been put in a box and forgotten but is finally on show at yesterday's Antiques for Everyone show at Birmingham's NEC.
In direct sunlight the contraption can create 1.5 volts of electricity, which is enough power to run a modern day digital watch. [...]
The first basic solar technology was built in 1883 by Charles Fritts but was found to be far too inefficient and nothing like today's models.
Russian physicist Aleksandr Stoletov developed the concept further by developing the first solar cell based on the outer photoelectric effect, a more stable and reliable cell.
But it was not until Russell Ohm patented the idea of the junction semiconductor solar cell, that the modern day solar panel was born.
This is the third comet to swing by the sun this year. Known as sun-grazing comets, the icy objects most likely come from the outer solar system, though it is unlikely that any survive their encounters with the sun. [...]
Astronomers estimate that there may be more than 1,600 comets in our solar system that swing through its heart to pass by the sun during their travels. As of 2000, the definitive count for sun-grazing comets passed the 1,000 mark.
"No single device for measuring the quality of pitching mechanics currently exists, so we have proposed a shirt that is lightweight and can be worn during bullpen sessions or exhibition games,” said Moche. “The shirt can be used to show when a player becomes fatigued and his mechanics worsen, through a display of real-time information on a monitor in the dugout."
Pitchers become more susceptible to injury when they lose consistency in their mechanics—the physics of how they throw the baseball, pitch after pitch.
Canter and Siegel went on to notoriety, claiming they’d made $100,000 from their Perl-script spamming. The two remained unrepentant, despite the backlash which led them to lose their hosting and even get Canter disbarred. [...]
Depending on who is counting, spam now accounts for nearly 90 percent of e-mail traffic — much of it sent through botnets or unscrupulous hosting companies and e-mail firms.
The astronomer's solitary vigil lasted for a few weeks; he ran out of telescope time with little to report. Nevertheless, his pioneering effort sparked the genesis of a 50-year project known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, now an international research program with a multimillion-dollar budget. It has included renting time on some of the biggest radio telescopes in the world—such as the 1,000-foot dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, featured in the James Bond movie "GoldenEye." [...]
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, once considered a quixotic enterprise at best, has now become part of mainstream science. In the past decade or so, over 400 planets have been found orbiting nearby stars, and astronomers estimate there could be billions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone. Biologists have discovered microbes living in extreme environments on Earth not unlike conditions on Mars, and have detected the molecular building blocks of life in deep space as well as in meteorites. Many scientists now maintain that the universe is teeming with life, and that some planets could harbor intelligent organisms.
