Today’s invention is a possible enhancement to existing touch-screens. A stalk-mounted lamp on eg a mobile device casts shadows of one’s fingers onto the screen.

When the shadows are seen by a small embedded camera to lie on certain screen elements, these are primed in the same way that normal rollover scripts work in a webpage.

This allows eg each key displayed on a small cellphone screen to grow as a finger approaches it, in order to make dialling easier.

I’ve described knot-tying techniques before and today’s invention is a new one. Imagine trying to tie a complex knot for the first time.

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.

Today’s invention is a shotgun cartridge which contains a secondary charge (This charge might be radially asymmetrical).

Each cartridge could be set, before loading, so that after a given flight time, this secondary charge would ignite; causing the pellets to be scattered in a pre-determined pattern around the centre of mass of the cartridge.

The pattern could take a variety of geometrical forms -from a diffuse cloud, meant to sting but not damage a target, to an annulus, intended to punch a hole in a partition wall.

Today’s invention is a screen management program which causes software objects (such as folders and documents) placed on a laptop desktop to behave as if subject to physical forces (primarily gravity). This would cause items to slide to the bottom of the screen unless ‘pegged’ in place.

Similarly, ‘paint’ applied to a graphic would drip downscreen in a physically real way.

All of these simulated phenomena would be influenced by the angle of the screen to the horizontal (ie the farther from vertical, the slower the movement).

Struts are often used in engineering systems, usually mutually cross-braced. Today’s invention attempts to provide these members with a form of adaptive internal strengthening.

Each strut (not necessarily of circular cross-section) has within it a conduit. This contains a strong, light metal rod. The rod can be moved along the conduit by a pneumatic pressure difference created by a pump fitted to one end.

When a strut is stressed, and begins to bend to a specific extent, the periodic passage of its rod may be locally slowed (which can be detected as resistance to the drive pressure, which is then removed in response).

This allows a rod to be automatically positioned at the point of maximal bending -reinforcing it before damage occurs.

When the stress is removed, rods can continue to patrol. A more advanced version of this idea involves the use of multiple reinforcement rods at different locations within each strut.

Today’s invention is a combined knitting and washing machine.

Clothing could all be made in a single sheet design. This would be designed to be completely unravellable, so that it could be pulled into a very small washing machine as a single, long fibre. This would allow washing to occur very efficiently -and also very quickly.

As the fibre emerged from the machine, it could be fed directly into a knitting machine (ie an automated loom). This would recreate some new, flat garment, whose pattern program could be selected from an online catalogue.

One’s entire wardrobe would thus fill only a few sacks of fibre and allow all wearable items to be made on the fly and to fit an individual perfectly. There might even be an intervening re-dyeing step, to change the colour of one’s outfit according to eg the season.

Armored vehicles, such as the bulletproof vehicles used by heads of state are often equipped with reactive armour. When a missile makes an impact, this detonates a surface charge on the vehicle, potentially nullifying the attack.

Today’s invention takes this a step further. When two or more impacts have occurred on such a target, an on-board computer records these and calculates where the most likely subsequent hit will occur (linear extrapolation would be a good first guess).

At this location, reactive armour can become proactive. This might involve firing a shield mechanism so that impact occurs between shield and missile at a greater stand-off distance from the vehicle body (or, it might be possible to populate the outer vehicle surface with protective plates capable of being moved rapidly across it, by a magnetic field pulse, to provide local reinforcement).

Today’s invention is an enhancement to existing aerofoil design.

A motor powers a set of sprocket wheels embedded within the body of an aircraft wing, near the leading edge. This drives a carbon fibre belt, which moves as shown.

This arrangement speeds the flow over the top surface of the aerofoil, without increasing drag on its lower surface, resulting in a significant increase in lift without a large weight increase.

(It also helps reduce ice build-up on wing surfaces).

If you have to use a shotgun to hunt flying food, today’s invention might help. This consists of a shotgun with barrels which move independently.

If a gamebird is being tracked from the hunter’s right to left, an accelerometer in the butt senses this and drops the left barrel by a fixed amount.

The right barrel is fired first and automatically followed milliseconds later by the left one. This allows the recoil from the right to raise the left one to be more nearly on target, optimising the placing of shot around an unfortunate bird.

If the bird is flying left to right, the sequence is automatically reversed.

We are surrounded by electronic kit that is nicely streamlined and therefore all as easily droppable as a bar of soap.

Today’s invention is an alternative to having an accelerometer on board to switch off any internal hard disk just as our favourite shiny toy hits the deck.

Touchscreens are ten a penny, so imagine having one on both the front and rear face of eg your smartphone. These would be of the type that sense any kind of pressure, not just skin contact.

Place the device on a table or remain holding it and it works fine. Remove all sources of surface contact (ie drop it) and the whole thing immediately interprets that as “I’m falling” and moves into crash resist mode.

(This might involve eg deploying some kind of small airbag or operating an internal motor to reorientate the system in flight for minimal damage when hitting the floor).