All medical staff in contact with patients would wear a brightly coloured bracelet. This would contain an aerosol full of harmless, water soluble paint.

The bracelet would also contain a timer which would ensure that a small spot of bright paint was delivered onto the back of a medic’s hand, say every ten minutes throughout the day.

Appearance of the paint would remind wearers to wash their hands at once. Patients could raise an objection if either the bracelet wasn’t worn or there was a spot of paint on the hand of their examiner.

Often I see people struggling to achieve this, either because the bag is too heavy, or they can’t manage to squat and thrust it into place without endangering people sitting below.

A curved shelf section would be installed at frequent intervals along a carriage/compartment/cabin. A cable would run from a catch attached to the shelf to a pulley in the ceiling.

Attaching bags to a hook on the upper end of the cable would allow them to be hoisted aloft and secured there, without causing a safety issue for those seated below. Use of extra pulleys would increase the mechanical advantage available. The slight slope of the shelf would allow the baggage items to descend later under control.

In the event that a bag is deployed, a message detailing the location is automatically sent to a preselected list of contacts (including eg the ambulance service, police, next of kin, Twitter, etc).

Just as when someone develops a restriction in their airway, this vacuum cleaner would have a sensor fitted to the motor which could detect the rise in current drawn when the hose began to block.

Quickly, it would change the motor direction, causing a sudden reversal of flow or ‘cough’.

This would last for only a fraction of a second, so that there would be no danger that a blockage could emerge from the hose inlet at any speed.

The cough could be repeated several times in succession if the motor load was not rapidly reduced.

Today’s invention is a hybrid animal/machine system which does not rely on machine intelligence -and might therefore work robustly.

A small terrier is equipped with a light body shield. This is attached to an armoured trolley via a lightweight cable. As the dog runs, the cable becomes slightly taught and the animal’s choice of direction is transmitted to the trolley’s motors via the bend within the cable. The dog can thus direct the trolley, running on powered tracks, but without having to pull it.

When the dog detects a wounded soldier it finds the scented tag attached to a harness with which he or she is equipped. The dog has been trained to drag the tag and drop it into an aperture on the trolley. A winch automatically pulls the soldier aboard and the dog runs back to base pursued closely by the trolley.

This would alert the user, before starting to re-read any such material, to the fact that this was old news -without having to filter and completely reformat the stories on eg the BBC website, only some of which change in the course of a day.

It would also lessen the frustration associated with coming across content repeated on different sites dressed up in alternative colours, formats and fonts.

They seem to miss the sensation of pressure on their bodies from a horizontal bed and covers. Strapping themselves in is a poor substitute.

Today’s invention is therefore an astronaut sleeping bag which forms a loose seal around the sleeper’s neck. The rear face of the bag is attached to a spacecraft wall surface at many locations.

The other end of the bag is connected to a small, silenced vacuum pump which sucks out the air and has the effect of holding the astronaut down onto the wall surface with a user-controlled pressure. This feels more like the experience of sleeping in his/her own, 1-g, bed at home.

Take a long rope of snap-together beads and roll around it a sheet of moist cardboard -or pastry.

Have the complex knot tied by an expert so that the coating is included in the body of the knot (have the expert make many of these). Allow the coating to dry and stiffen, forming a knot-shaped shell. Pull on the free ends of the beaded rope so that it can be extracted.

You now have a shell which can be used to pass rope through, from one end -automatically forming a complex knot. The coating can now be stripped off, reconstituted and reused, leaving the finished knot behind.

This would be lockable in position and also limit any attempt to read the end of the story first.

Several vehicles now have a touchscreen which provides access to all of these sources of information and entertainment…this seems like a bad idea from a road safety viewpoint. Even if mounted somewhere a driver can see it without constantly glancing down, it’s still a less than optimal solution.

Today’s invention is to equip such touchscreens with an algorithm which senses the amount of fiddling about that a user is doing. If this exceeds a certain time limit (which might decrease with the speed of the vehicle), then it would issue a warning to park -or switch off the display until velocity = zero.