Inventions

A prolific inventor who has spent more than a decade proving toys aren't all fun and games has been awarded millions of dollars by a federal jury, which said toy giant Mattel Inc. infringed on his patent with its popular "Hot Wheels." "I am floating on cloud nine," 66-year-old Jerome Lemelson said Friday, a day after the judgment. "My hope is that as a result of it, toy inventors will get a fair shake from the industry." The jury awarded Lemelson $24.

PHILADELPHIA - Saturday the Barnes Foundation opens its new museum here on the busy Benjamin Franklin Parkway. With hundreds of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos, it's just up the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose officials were instrumental in pulling strings to make it happen. Anticipation has been running high. Eight years ago a local judge granted permission for the incomparable art installation to relocate from its unique home out on the Main Line, available to anyone who wished to visit.

Harold Hay wants to help the world save itself, but he's running out of time. Forty years ago, Hay invented a simple, inexpensive way to heat and cool a home using the sun's rays, but without the panels and wiring that come with conventional solar energy systems. He's been pushing for its adoption ever since, trying to find footing in each of the solar industry's last three boom-and-bust cycles.

A polite comedy about a potentially rude subject,"Hysteria"takes its title from the medical condition diagnosed to women in Victorian England for any number of unrelated symptoms. As a treatment, doctors would stimulate a woman to orgasm, referred to as "manual massage to paroxysm," leading one beleaguered physician, essentially as a labor-saving device, to invent the vibrator. In the film, which opens in Los Angeles on May 18, the progressive young doctor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy)

It sounds too good to be true: A residential system that allows people to make fuel from old beer, leftover wine and other waste products and use it to run their vehicles. That's what inventors of the E-Fuel MicroFueler claim, and there's support for the idea in government, industry and pop culture. MicroFueler buyers are eligible for a $5,000 tax credit. Former L.A. Laker Shaquille O'Neal is an investor in the system's distributor. The $10,000 E-Fuel MicroFueler consists of a 250-gallon tank for organic feedstock, such as waste wine and beer, and a still that converts it to pure ethanol, or E-Fuel.

Next time you brush against a car in the grocery store parking lot, it might just break out in song. Well, rap, actually. The Canoga Park inventor of an electronic car alarm system that verbally warns passersby to back off has updated his creation to include a musical message urging would-be thieves to bust a move instead of bust in. Venture too close to a car outfitted with Michael Nykerk's Invisibeam system and a voice from somewhere under the hood lets loose: "Yo!

Forklift Canopy: Just one more word on protection from the elements. It's a hot, humid day. And who gets the most sympathy? Forklift operators for one--the ones baking under the sun. Donald Gibson of Orange has been marketing the Dry-Op canopy, a piece of tinted vinyl that attaches to overhead guards on forklifts, protecting operators from sunburn or, for that matter, rain, falling dust or overhead spills.

Here is a roundup of alleged cons, frauds and schemes to watch out for. Grandparent scam — On the other end of the phone is the sound of desperation. A caller claiming to be the call recipient's grandson says he has been arrested while traveling in Mexico and needs money to be wired immediately. Only it's a scam. And the victim's grandson is safe. The money, however, is gone forever. The so-called grandparent scam has been around for years, but it's recently become more sophisticated.

Re "Gene Issues Take Root," editorial, July 15: The overall concept of patenting genes should be questioned. One fundamental rule of patent law is that "prior invention" invalidates a patent. That is, something that previously existed (other than in the hands of the person applying for the patent) cannot be patented. Well, I must inform you that human genes have existed for thousands of years. The genes that make me who I am could be found in my mother or father when they were born (over 90 years ago)

"Are you tired of having to catch your mice by hand and have them escape? Then my super dooper mouse trap is for you." That was the pitch of second-grade inventor Arun Dharan, who, along with his classmates at Balboa Magnet School, was giving an audience of relatives and friends the hard sell Friday at the class' invention convention. The event was the culmination of six months of studying about inventors and their inventions as part of the Invent America! program developed in 1987 by the U.S.

Gideon Sundback -- the man who did not invent the zipper but did perfect it -- is the recipient today of a giant, interactive Google Doodle zipper. It's a doodle to add zip to your day, honoring the birthday of the man who helped introduce the fastening device into everyday clothing. Look around -- there's a good chance you'll see Sundback's handiwork in nearly every item of clothing you own, save shirts and blouses. Even sneakers sport zippers these days.

Dr. Paul H. Crandall, a UCLA neurosurgeon who pioneered now widely used techniques for diagnosing the source of epileptic seizures in the brain and removing the offending cells, died March 15 from complications of pneumonia at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. He was 89. Crandall, who founded the UCLA Department of Neurosurgery, "was the father of UCLA's epilepsy program," Dr. Neil Martin, the current chairman of neurosurgery at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine, said in a statement.

Spend too much time with 24-hour news networks and it's easy to feel that exposure to that much talk can make you sick. Taking the idea a few steps further, author Ben Marcus imagines a world in which language becomes fatal in "The Flame Alphabet," a powerfully strange and frequently disturbing work that examines the power of words in a new, apocalyptic way. Similar in grim, end-times spirit to Colson Whitehead's zombie-pocalypse novel "Zone One,"...

Analia Saban went to art school at the height of the recent market boom, when it was not uncommon for students, particularly in UCLA's prestigious painting program, to be fielding offers from galleries and selling work directly out of their studios. It had a significant impact on the direction of her career, though not because she profited by it at the time. Indeed, she had a rough go of it. Raised in Buenos Aires, she came to Los Angeles in 2002 by way of a small college in New Orleans, where she studied video art primarily.

Chopsticks A Novel Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral Razorbill: 304 pp., $19.99, ages 12 and older The first indication that "Chopsticks" is significantly more than just a novel is its trailer, which encourages readers to watch, listen, feel, look, discover, view and imagine. All of those activities are not only encouraged but enabled in this ambitious and hefty tome that works as a sort of interactive scrapbook. An exercise in multimedia storytelling, "Chopsticks" is a book, but it's also an iPhone and iPad app peppered with videos, songs and instant messages that bring the story to life in a way that isn't possible with words alone.

Fire. The wheel. A hamburger with cheese. Pasadena is staking its claim this week as the birthplace of one of mankind's greatest discoveries with the launch of Pasadena Cheeseburger Week, a Chamber of Commerce event promoting area restaurants. Legend has it that teenage short-order cook Lionel Clark Sternberger invented the cheeseburger one fateful day in the mid-1920s at a restaurant called The Rite Spot on Colorado Boulevard, west of the Colorado Street Bridge, then part of Route 66. The chamber makes its case with less than rock-solid proof: a Wikipedia entry citing competing claims and second-hand accounts of the Sternberger story, including an unsourced, single-sentence obituary from a 1964 issue of Time magazine.

When he was learning to do hip replacements, Dr. Hank Wuh, a young orthopedic surgeon, was frustrated by the slow and potentially harmful method used to remove the cement securing an old artificial joint before replacing it. "Taking out the old cement was tedious, the blood loss was high and there was always the risk of fracturing the femur, or thigh bone," said Wuh. After much experimentation, Wuh and his co-inventor, Dr.

Every revolution has elements of tragedy as well as triumphs — even the bloodless revolutions in the way people earn a living. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called it "creative destruction," the entrepreneurial-driven process that "incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. " Such a process was set in motion by digital technology, which released information from...

In November 1947, shortly after the United Nations voted for partition of the Holy Land into separate Arab and Jewish states, Chaim Weizmann was cited by the New York Times as saying that "the most important work now was to build Palestine. " What? To build Palestine? Yes, in 1947 the word "Palestinian" — if it meant anything at all — referred to Jews living in Palestine. The Palestine Post (now the Jerusalem Post) was the Jewish English-language newspaper. The Palestine Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic)