In the seventies I remember seeing Chieftain tanks whose steel tracks had been fitted with rubber inserts to avoid destroying German roads. Later, I saw football boots with stud packs that could rotate to avoid knee injuries.

Today’s invention is inspired by these artefacts. It’s a vehicle tyre, for steered wheels, with rubber inserts which can rotate, as shown.

Not only would this provide extra protection against being punctured, but it would also help protect the road surface and the tyres when cornering.

Although balancing these might be non-trivial, damaged inserts could be fairly easily replaced, without having to dump the whole tyre. Extra tread variants would be easy to attach, also.

Everyone has heard about the use of inflatable tanks to deceive the enemy’s intelligence work.

Today’s idea takes that approach a step further.

Dummy tanks can be made for a tiny fraction of the cost of a real one, but these have only been used as static decoys. So imagine making a huge number of them from say plywood with a thin steel skin, each one equipped with a remote controlled chassis from some kind of quadbike. They might have internal loudspeakers and smoke generators too.

Quadbikes and skin kits could be airdropped beside conventional armour for a sudden attack if necessary.

Now equip all your real tanks with an outer skin of plywood and thin steel, so that they are indistinguishable from the fake ones (even using eg thermal imaging).

When battle commences, an enemy army will be intimidated and confused by the size of their opposition and waste ammunition firing at many fake, rolling tanks.

Some of these vehicles will be surprisingly fast moving, adding to the confusion and making target selection much more difficult.

Say you want to make a filter or a catalyst and you use incompressible, cylindrical fibres. Even when the fibres are packed together as closely as possible, there will be a guaranteed minimum volume between them (through which a fluid might percolate).

(If you use square section fibres, they might align, in the worst case, so as to give effectively zero volume between them).

Today’s invention is to use fibres for your device which are regular octagons in cross section.

These provide a minimum flow volume -which is way better than those with square cross section and just a little bit better than purely cylindrical fibres.

Octagonal ones may well offer the best possible minimum porosity, but this hasn’t been proven yet.

In an application which is super sensitive to the pressure drop through the system, this small difference in flow space might be significant.

I believe that a C5 transport jet can fly at about Mach 0.7 .

Today’s invention aims to increase the top speed of all such transport planes with a rear pallet loading system (and a strong enough air frame).

It might get in the way of airdrops, but imagine a pallet consisting of a liquid fuel jet engine. The rear door could be opened and the jet smoothly ignited to provide a burst of thrust to evade eg SAM missiles or to effect a sharper take off whenever necessary.

The jet pallet itself could be parachuted out and recovered if stowage forward needed to be dropped.

Many motorists say, after crashing into a motorbiker, “I just didn’t see you.”

This can happen in good visibility, when the bike rider is bedecked in dayglo colours and his headlight is on.

One problem seems to be that it’s easy to overlook a single oncoming headlight, or even a fixed bank of spotlights, because its hard to see things that aren’t moving relative to the observer.

Some instructors suggest wiggling your front forks a little if you feel you haven’t been seen. This is fine but a) this may not be safe to do and b) there is still guesswork around whether the motorcyclist’s headlight has been registered.

Today’s invention offers a cheap approach to increased riding safety.

A thin plastic lens is attached to the headlight, using a couple of small springs. The lens may need a small weight attached.

The springs/mass system is chosen so that a wide variety of road surfaces will cause the lens to oscillate chaotically across the headlight lens.

Without losing any of the light’s output, the jiggling of the beam will make a motorcyclist much more detectable.

Many statues of famous historical figures are now controversial, because those figures may have behaved badly by today’s standards.

Today’s invention gives people back some control of whose statues appear in their cities.

Imagine a statue on a plinth of variable height.

People can express approval or disapproval by eg typing in their email address at one of a number of terminals in a town square.

The statue plinth is mounted on a hydraulic cylinder whose height increases with the number of supportive entries made.

Similarly, if a statue’s popularity falls below a certain threshold, it will withdraw below street level and be replaced by the statue of somebody else on a list.

Today’s invention is a mountain bike (or go-kart) circuit which incorporates sections of these reconfigurable mould surfaces as track components.

This would allow eg racing to occur using a different circuit for every race.

For racing inside a hangar, sections could be mounted on lockable wheels so as to allow lengths of the track to be quickly swapped in and out, thus providing a great deal more challenge for riders and interest for spectators.