Aluminum foil as glassware scrubber: To get baked-on food off a glass pan or an oven rack, use dishwashing liquid and a ball of foil in place of a steel-wool soap pad, says Mary Findley, president of the cleaning-products developer Mary Moppins.

CNN: New uses for Thanksgiving items

Heighway Pinball's solution is to introduce inductive switch technology: solid state sensors beneath the playfield, well out of the way of flying steel balls, which are triggered when a ball passes by without any physical contact.

BBC: Flipping heck: Is pinball about to stage a recovery?

Thousands of genes stick to each ball, and the combination is loaded into a "gene gun"--two small stainless-steel chambers and a vacuum pump--that uses compressed helium.

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