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The big squeeze Students figure out how to juice an orange in 10 or more steps.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Erin Holmes Daily Herald Staff Writer

There's typically not a whole lot that can go wrong when you're juicing an orange.

Except when you're using a sledgehammer, dominoes, a balloon, marbles, magnets, a bell, a seesaw or a mousetrap.

That ups the disaster quotient considerably - as Maine West High's accelerated Physics I students, the masterminds behind a concoction of cleverly complex machines created to accomplish a ridiculously simple task, likely would tell you.

"Different things can just go wrong out of the blue," said Shannon Ehlert, a junior from Des Plaines whose girls-only "Mighty Ducks" team incorporated rubber duckies into its machine for the school's annual Rube Goldberg contest.

The team also used a bowling ball, which crushed junior Megan French's wrist when she raced to grab the orange - it had prematurely begun to roll - from the heavy ball's path.

Her wrist was juiced instead.

But "It's not broken, to the best of my knowledge," she said, offering a meager grin.

The weirder-is-better Rube Goldberg competition, named for...

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