Coaster

Hersheypark will add a first-of-its-kind $25-million steel roller coaster in May that will be the tallest, fastest and longest at the Pennsylvania theme park. > Photos: Skyrush coaster at Hersheypark After a yearlong viral marketing campaign that teased fans with hints and clues about " Attraction 2012 ," Hersheypark unveiled plans Tuesday for an Intamin Wing Mega coaster , with winged seats, called Skyrush. Under construction in the Comet Hollow section of Hersheypark , the 200-foot-tall Skyrush coaster will feature a near-vertical 85-degree first drop followed by four high-speed banking turns and five airtime hills at speeds reaching 75 mph. The 3,600-foot-long Skyrush track will travel along a creek and cross over the 1947 Comet out-and-back wooden coaster.

All the playoff combinations and permutations can be reduced to one statement: If the Lakers beat Houston on Wednesday, they finish seventh in the Western Conference. "I know my math," Pau Gasol said Tuesday. It makes total sense, given the way the Lakers' season has tumbled and unfolded, lurched and lolled, only to flip upward in the final week. The Lakers, winners of four consecutive games, want to beat Houston for numerous reasons. Momentum, obviously, could be carried into the postseason, but the Lakers would also match up better against San Antonio than top-seeded Oklahoma City in the first round.

I use this wine coaster almost every night. Subtle and understated, it was designed by Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann in 1905. I bought it at the Neue Galerie   in New York. The museum dedicated to early 20th-century German and Austrian art and design has a phenomenal gift shop with reproductions of many of the iconic pieces of Viennese design. (It is also home to Café Sabarsky, a great address for coffee and pastries or a light lunch -- and just across from the Metropolitan Museum.)

The gig: Tim Burkhart, 54, is corporate vice president of maintenance and construction for Six Flags Entertainment Corp. , the parent company of Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia and 17 other parks in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Burkhart's resume is pretty short. He has spent his entire career at Six Flags, starting in 1977 when he was in high school and worked as a ride operator on Revolution, the first looping roller coaster. It was meant to be a temporary job to raise money for some senior-year fun. Instead, Burkhart said, he fell in love with the park and its employees.

Six Flags Magic Mountain is expected to add a terrain-hugging launched roller coaster in 2013 featuring the world's tallest loop, according to an employee who wasn't authorized to speak on behalf of the amusement park. A Magic Mountain mechanic inadvertently revealed closely guarded facts about the record-setting  attraction while casually talking with a group of coaster enthusiasts during the recent West Coast Bash event at the Valencia amusement park. Details of the conversation quickly appeared on the Theme Park Review  website and rapidly spread through the online coaster community.

Dino Land theme park in China recently unveiled the $20-million Dinoconda , a thrilling fourth-dimension roller coaster with independently rotating seats. PHOTOS: Dinoconda 4-D coaster at China's Dino Land Located in Changzhou about two hours west of Shanghai, the Chinese park known as the "Jurassic Park of the East" features roller coasters, thrill rides and attractions themed to dinosaurs and mythical creatures. The mechanically complex coaster boasts wing-shaped vehicles with seats that rotate head over heels, both forward and backward.

The Verbolten multi-launch roller coaster debuting in Spring 2012 at Busch Gardens Williamsburg will take riders on a high-speed drive along the German autobahn before detouring through the forbidden Black Forest. > Photos: Verbolten coaster at Busch Gardens Williamsburg The themed family coaster at the Virginia theme park will feature two launch zones and an indoor section of the ride with special effects. The 3-1/2-minute ride will travel along a 2,800-foot-long track twisting and turning through the woods.

Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk plans to replace a 20-year-old steel coaster with the $5.5 million Undertow spinning coaster in summer 2013. > Photos: Undertow spinning coaster at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk Undertow is being billed as Northern California's only spinning coaster after Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo removed Pandemonium, a short-lived 2008 Gerstlauer spinning coaster formerly known as Tony Hawk's Big Spin. The 50-foot-tall Undertow will reach speeds of 40 mph along a 1,400-foot-long track.

Knott's Berry Farm has reopened a roller coaster involved in an accident that injured 10 riders after making adjustments to the ride following an initial state investigation, officials of the Buena Park theme park said. The Pony Express launch-style coaster failed to make it up an incline on Oct. 7 and rolled back into the loading station, slamming into another train waiting to depart. All the injured riders were released from the hospital the day after the accident.

England's Alton Towers is set to unleash the latest salvo in its arsenal of Secret Weapon roller coasters in March 2013 with the addition of a $29-million "world's first" ride aimed squarely at thrill-seekers. PHOTOS: Secret Weapon 7 (SW7) coaster at Alton Towers The United Kingdom theme park recently submitted plans to the local planning district that show a compact track layout with numerous inversions and several subterranean sections. Coaster fans have already converted the submitted plans into highly detailed concept art and animated videos . Alton Park has released few details about the new coaster, codenamed Secret Weapon 7 or SW7 for short, other than to say the two minute and 45 second ride will feature an initial drop of 98 feet and cover more than 3,800 feet of track while topping 50 mph. The custom track layout appears to feature at least eight inversions (with as many as 11, by some accounts)

Wanda Ferrin fills her husband's prescription for the generic antibiotic doxycycline at a Target in Simi Valley. For years, the medication has cost her $6 a month. In February, however, the price tripled to $18 for 30 pills. And this month, it skyrocketed to $133. This is noteworthy enough. But what happened next makes the entire business of drug pricing a study in lunacy. "A pharmacy clerk at Target suggested running the prescription through the company's discount program," Ferrin, 61, recalled.

In the three decades since the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in a temporary space downtown in 1983, it has been variously flush with money and desperate for a bailout after having squandered its endowment. It's had great directors and controversial ones, good shows and bad shows, dissension in the ranks of its board, years of high attendance and periods of anemic crowds. Although its ranking among museums internationally has been somewhat diminished by the rise of newer, more ambitious institutions and its curatorial staff is a fraction of what it once was, its permanent collection remains one of the most acclaimed in the world.

A $12-million roller coaster at a Scandinavian theme park will take riders on an off-road trek aboard all-terrain vehicles through a Mayan jungle in search of lost treasure. Photos: Juvelen launch coaster at Djurs Sommerland The dual-launch coaster themed to look like 4x4 quads is set to debut May 4 at Djurs Sommerland in Denmark. Juvelen, Danish for jewel, will take coaster riders on a four-wheeler journey in a hunt for lost gemstones. Reaching speeds of 50 mph along 3,330 feet of track, the ATV-style coaster trains will travel through a jungle setting dotted with waterfalls, stone totems and Mayan temples.

Ride enthusiasts are already drooling over a multi-launch roller coaster coming to a Swedish amusement park that promises six inversions and a series of near-miss encounters with other rides dotting a wooded hillside terrain. Photos: Projekt Helix megacoaster at Liseberg Dubbed Projekt Helix, the $30-million coaster is set to debut in spring 2014 at the Liseberg amusement park located outside Gothenburg, about equidistant between Oslo, Norway, and Copenhagen, Denmark, along Sweden's west coast.

Shares of Los Angeles nutritional products company Herbalife Ltd. went on a wild ride Monday, falling 12% on news of a law enforcement investigation, only to close with a gain for the day after a regulatory agency cast doubt on such a probe. At least one thing is clear about Herbalife: Its investors are extremely jittery. The New York Post reported Monday that an unidentified law enforcement agency is investigating Herbalife, which has faced intense scrutiny since billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman accused it in December of operating a pyramid scheme and bet $1 billion that its shares would fall.

At its most basic level, a 3-D printer is like an automated hot-glue gun programmed to spit out solid objects. The machines extrude layers of plastic into virtually any three-dimensional shape. Print whimsical garden statuary. Reproduce an anatomically correct heart with moving parts for your son's science project (actually, he could do that himself). Create a signature bookend, cookie cutter, necklace - anything. The buzz within the design world is that most homes could have one of these gadgets within 10 years.

If you go Cedar Point, 1 Cedar Point Drive, Sandusky, Ohio; (419) 627-2350, http://www.cedarpoint.com . Must: Cedar Downs Racing Derby, one of the last racing carousels in the world. Miss: The miserable Mantis stand-up coaster, which left my head aching. Kennywood, 4800 Kennywood Blvd., West Mifflin, Pa.; (412) 461-0500, http://www.kennywood.com . Must: The Sky Rocket is ideal for kids transitioning from junior coasters to metal monsters. Miss: Garfield's Nightmare, a glow-in-the-dark comic strip makeover of the 1901 Old Mill ride that ruins the park's oldest attraction.

At dusk, driving north on Interstate 15 near the California-Nevada border, Loren Gill descends a graceful mountain straightaway and sees before him the twinkling lights of the Promised Land. But this isn't Las Vegas - that's still 40 miles away. Instead, Gill spies the stopover at Primm, Nev. With three casinos and sundry services, it's a roadside curiosity turned welcome mat to Nevada's casino culture. As the district manager of Affinity Gaming, which runs the three gambling establishments, it's Gill's job to make sure that a good number of the 40,000 cars, pickups, RVs and semis that pass here each day ignore the siren call of the Strip, if just for a moment.

Kings enforcer Kevin Westgarth went through the same emotional extremes felt by everyone else who had an interest in the labor talks held last week in New York between the NHL and the players' association. But Westgarth was a member of the players' delegation that met with owners and had a first-hand experience of all that went on, including the euphoria that blossomed on Tuesday when it seemed the sides were moving closer and the deflation on Thursday after the league broke off talks.