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).

People apparently find people with large pupils attractive (as if they have been dilated by the action of various hormones).

Today’s invention is cosmetic contact lenses which have a clear section in the middle but a dark section around that which makes the natural pupil look much wider than reality (and thus more attractive).

(You can see through the clear window in the middle, but to an observer this looks exactly as dark as the adjacent dark band).

Today’s invention is a small but robust clamp I can use to stop my seven year old daughter from reading all of her latest book at one sitting.

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

Today’s invention is a variable-strength version of Velcro.

The hooks would be as before. The other side would be made of loops which are each joined on one end to another backing layer, as shown.

Pulling this layer downwards would change the length of the loops. Those loops engaged with hoops would then be more strongly retained to their hooks, boosting the strength of the bond.

The spacing between loop layer and its backing layer, might be altered by having eg pneumatic tubes or even piezocrystals placed between them.

This provides a means by which the strength of bond could be made to vary in a controlled way from place to place and as a function of time.

Car drivers are now beset by a large range of electronic information. GPS, radio and performance diagnostics all demand attention that might better be directed towards events on the road.

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.

Given the rise in obesity the range of bodyweights amongst youngsters is widening.

In the playground, this may mean that any two children are unable to enjoy a see-saw together.

Today’s invention is therefore a see-saw mechanism which measures the weights of two children who sit on it and subtly shortens the side on which the heavier child is seated -so as to bring the device into balance (probably by sliding the seats along the seesaw rail).

This means that both fat and very skinny children get a chance to play (and exercise) together.

Today’s invention is a robotic device which can tilt a cup of freshly-poured latte and, using a dipper, draw shapes in the microbubble milk foam on the top.

This would be a programmable device capable of producing designs chosen by customers from a jukebox like menu.

It would also be able to write short printed messages in the foam, as typed into a keypad by the barrista.

Today’s invention is a way for drivers of left-hand-drive-vehicles to overtake more safely.

A periscope is mounted across the top of the dashboard with a motor driven mirror unit protruding through the window (extendable when overtaking is anticipated.

This allows the driver to rotate the mirror unit and see what’s behind and in front using only small lateral movements of the vehicle.

The unit might obviously be reused to help drivers of right-hand-drive cars in lhd countries.

I’m always interested in ways to deal with birdstrikes on jet planes.

Today’s invention is basically a Dyson vortex vacuum cleaner cylinder bolted to the front of a jet engine.

Blades inside the sleeve rotate the incoming air (not so much as to churn the incoming flow to the fan, but enough to deflect say a 1kg bird to the periphery and exhaust it, as shown).

My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that it might be possible to get a bird out of the way using a tube ~3m long, but the extra fuel costs, due to drag and weight, are harder to quantify).

In future, when travelling between solar systems, astronauts will need spacestations and other equipment for colonisation and life support.

Rather than attempt to take this stuff with them, at huge cost, space travellers will need to take only a very large tube of adhesive.

Today’s invention is to skirt interstellar dustclouds, harvest this material (over a long time) and then use desktop manufacturing techniques to assemble structural components needed for repairs or landings, as needed, whilst in flight.

The dust might be bonded together into useful material (with locally optimised density and strength) via a combination of home-bought epoxy and pressure moulding processes (using the spacecraft internal pressure vs the vacuum of space).