And last month, she received a patent for her Time Machine, an LED light bed, which she invented to help reverse signs of aging on the entire body.

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"You can't assume the other person gets it, " says Ms. Hanson, 42, who's now working on a second business that sells a diaper-changing pillow she invented called the SnuggWugg.

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She was deprived of her Dutch citizenship last month, amid claims that she had obtained asylum under false pretences (she admits that she invented some details in order to enter Holland, but denies that she ever concealed this during her political career).

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As a student at Princeton, Eden had been studying the feasibility of installing a solar panel she had invented that rotates with the sun, increasing solar efficiency by 40 percent.

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There she is, right over here -- invented a new type of sugar packet that dissolves in hot water.

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Kushner employs a similarly eerie confidence throughout her novel, which constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical.

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"Freedom of expression is not something we invented, its limits are well known, " she said.

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Larsson invented a completely new sort of detective a tattooed, computer-hacking she-punk.

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