Blog Posts by Sarah B. Weir, Yahoo! blogger

courtesy WLUC-TVDiane McNease, a high school student from the northern Michigan town of Ishpeming, had sweet idea when she saw a friend folding Starburst wrappers. "I was waiting for my event at a swim meet," she tells Shine, "and an exchange student from Ecuador was making them into bracelets." Eighteen thousand candies later, she fashioned the bodice of a homemade dress completely out of the colorful papers and wore it to the prom last Saturday night, May 5. Her date, Luke DeWitt, is one of her best friends from the swim team.

VIDEO: Pier Breaks As Prom Picture Taken

The teen told WLUC-TV it took her a year-and-a-half to collect all the wrappers and five months to create the dress which also features a black satin "ball gown" skirt layered with tulle. "It was kind of a dare," she tells Shine. "Someone said I couldn't do it. That's the last thing you should say to me." She says DeWitt encouraged her through the whole process.

McNease explains to Shine that she did have some help. "My friend

Young and Grimes courtesy CNNDarnell "Dynasty" Young, 17, was expelled today from Arsenal Tech High in Indianapolis for bringing a stun gun to school to scare away a group of bullies who he says had been tormenting him for months. "I couldn't believe that they did it," his mother Chelisa Grimes told the Indiana Star. "They really kicked him out." Grimes provided her son with the device in April.

According to Young, who is openly gay, other students began teasing him the first day of school, calling him homophobic slurs and curse words. As the year progressed, their harrasment intensified and he considered committing suicide. "They threw bottles at me. They threw rocks at me when I was getting off the bus after school," he told Fox 59 News. "I feel disrespected, because I'm a nice person."

Grimes says she armed Young with a stun gun device after reporting the bullying to the school a number of times without result. The Indiana Star reports Larry Yarrell, the Tech principal, said the administration had

According to a new study by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Duke University, 42% of Americans may be obese by 2030. Moreover, 1 out of 10 people will be severely obese. "This is a group at risk of really great health implications, yet they are increasing at even a greater rate than overall obesity," study co-author Justin Trogdon, PhD, of the Research Triangle Institute, said at a news conference reporting the findings.

The public health implications are staggering. Overweight and obesity is linked to many chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and cancer. The economic burden obesity puts on the health care system amounts to about $147 billion dollars a year, or 9% of annual medical costs.

It's clear that America needs to go on a collective diet, but which one? Each week, a new book hits the bestseller lists, often with contradictory advice. Should you eat mostly meat or mostly carbohydrates? Dine like a caveman or a French

Maurice Sendak in 2011"Kids books…Grown up books…That's just marketing," illustrator and author Maurice Sendak told colleague Art Spiegelman in an interview for The New Yorker in 1993. Sendak, who died this morning at age 83 from complications from a stroke, was famous for spelunking in the murkier recesses of children's psyches in books like "Where the Wild Things Are," "In the Night Kitchen," and "Outside Over There."

"Where the Wild Thing Are," the story of Max, a naughty boy in a wolf suit who is sent to bed with no supper and instead finds himself dancing with monsters was "simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making" when it was published in 1963 reports the New York Times.

Some librarians found the book too disturbing and banned it from shelves. The Los Angeles Times reports that psychologists "condemned" the book for being "too dark." Nevertheless, "Where the Wild Things Are" was awarded the Caldecott Medal by the American Library Association in 1964, and is one of the 10 best

In 1953, David N. Mullany was bankrupt and out of a job, but he still pretended to go to the office everyday so that his 12-year-old son, David, Jr., wouldn't worry. One hot August night, he came home and sat on the porch watching his son and some friends struggling to pitch a curve with a perforated golf ball they were using because there had been too many broken windows that summer. Crack! An idea came like a home run hit with bases loaded.

Related: Little-known baseball facts to impress the kids

It took a number of samples, but Mullany eventually came up with a lightweight plastic ball that had eight oblong perforations. He took a bet on his invention, mortgaged the family home and started selling the ball out of the back of his station wagon. When Woolworth's picked up the toy in 1954, an icon of American ingenuity was born.

Related: 7 Smart Toys for Today's Connected Kids

Today, Wiffle Ball, Inc. is still a family business and is helmed by Mullany's grandson, David

Bizarre therapies may have placebo effectOn Monday, South Korean customs officials made the horrifying announcement that they had confiscated over 17 thousand capsules stuffed with the dried, powdered flesh of babies. The pills, smuggled in from the northeastern China, are taken as a general tonic and stamina booster.

The BBC reports that a customs official told the Korea Times, "It was confirmed those capsules contain materials harmful to the human body, such as super bacteria. We need to take tougher measures to protect public health." No one has come forward to admit to becoming sick, but then, why would anyone willingly admit to consuming the ghoulish elixir?

Baby pills are perhaps the most shocking product used for medicinal purposes, but they are by no means the only one. The World Wildlife Foundation reports that the demand for tiger bone and rhino horn for use in some traditional Chinese medicines has pushed species close to extinction. The use of bile from the gall bladders of bears has also decimated bear

The bizarre case of "Tanning Mom" Patricia Krentcil, a New Jersey parent who allegedly put her 5-year-old daughter in a tanning booth where she sustained burns, comes only weeks after the Mayo Clinic announced that over the last 40 years melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer, has increased eightfold for young women. The study attributes the dramatic rise to an increase in the use of indoor tanning beds.

Related: "Tanning Mom": Does New Jersey Woman Suffer from Tanorexia?

"People who use tanning indoor tanning beds frequently are 74 percent more likely to develop melanoma," says lead investigator, Jerry Brewer, MD. "The results of this study emphasize the importance of active interventions to decrease risk factors for skin cancer, and in particular, to continue to alert young women that indoor tanning has carcinogenic effects that increase the risk of melanoma." Tanning beds are also associated with squamous cell carcinoma.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Lots of kids think that sports drinks and energy drinks have health benefits that make them better to consume than soda. Not so, especially for your teeth, according to a new report published in the most recent issue of General Dentistry. "Patients are shocked to learn that these drinks are essentially bathing their teeth with acid," says Poonam Jain, BDS, MS, MPH, lead author of the study, in a press release. They also found that energy drinks including popular brands such as Red Bull and Rockstar, cause twice as much damage to the teeth as sports drinks.

After only five days of regular exposure, the high levels of acid in these beverages erode tooth enamel, the glossy outer layer of the tooth and start causing irreversible harm. Without the protection of enamel, teeth become sensitive, more likely to get cavities, and more prone to decay. "Teens regularly come into my office with these types of symptoms, but they don't know why," says Academy of General Dentistry (AGD)