Today’s invention is a new form of helicopter rotor.

A horizontal carbon fibre torus (yellow) contains a number of carts which run on its interior surface. Each cart is attached to a rotor blade (white).

The blades are joined to a central ring which is a commutator like, circular electrical connection (blue). This passes electricity from the motor down wires to power a motor in each cart.

The carts drive the rotor blades, but with zero reaction torque on the body of the aircraft.

This does away with the need for any kind of torque-compensating rear rotor.

The aircraft might carry a battery or be powered by a jet turbine/generator combination.

A helicopter might have several such rotors, offering extra safety via redundancy.

Infantry on a battlefield will often want to surrender when confronted by tanks or attack helicopters.

This is a perilous exercise, since the process of surrendering to a war machine is not clear and waiting about for the associated infantry to appear is risky.

Today’s invention is a mobile, lightly armoured cell block. This is mounted on a robot chassis and can be air dropped onto a battlefield a few at a time.

Soldiers who want to capitulate, each dump any weapons in a hopper on the side and then enter the vehicle, one at a time, via a metal detector and bomb sniffing doorway. Soldiers each lock themselves into a cubicle and when the cell wagon is full, the vehicle departs to the safety at the rear.

Soldiers who can’t immediately get aboard may pick up a white flag which would be dropped alongside the cell blocks, so that they can give up in the usual way.

When I was small, playing with toy guns was an essential part of growing up. My mother went to great lengths to buy me a plastic Thompson submachine gun and my father modified it so that it could no longer fire the plastic rounds with which it came equipped.

Now, however, toy guns are often considered seriously bad. I guess the thinking is that children may develop violent tendencies but they have ‘World of Warcraft’ for that. It certainly became actively dangerous to run around the Belfast streets with a black plastic gun in my five year old hands.

Today’s invention is for parents who want to discourage their kids from gunplay.

The grips of the toy gun would be made of metal plates. These would be connected in a circuit with a very small voltage across them.

The voltage would be just sufficient to cause an unpleasant buzzing in a young sherriff’s hand, but without the possibility of doing any actual harm.

(If this seems rather draconian, I urge anyone reading this to search online for bitter aloes, which was commonly used to stop me chewing my fingernails when I was stressed).

Mixing fluids is important and difficult.

Today’s invention is a way to determine optically just how mixed eg a can of paint is (and might be applied to many other industrial processes).

Paint is mixed using a robotically-driven stirrer with an endoscope (or two) within it.
The stirrer can send information to a computer, with image processing capability, which can tell by colour contrast, what the state of mixing is locally.

If it’s well mixed then the endoscope would be automatically moved to a new location within the container.

This process would continue until the degree of local mixing at each 3D location, assessed by contrast, was within an acceptable tolerance. Multispectral contrast would allow machines to spot unmixed regions with greater precision than human eyes.

Doing CPR on someone is often not that effective. One reason is that it’s quite hard to know how hard to pump the chest.

Today’s invention is a simple clip-on device to be worn on the outside of clothing and with a pad set to click when squeezed with the correct force (set for an individual -depending on chest size and clothing density). This would be attached on the best spot for CPR and with an instruction to press hard enough to hear clicks, and to the beat of the Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive”).

If the wearer is found lying unconscious, anyone could press on their chest with the correct force to hear the clicks.

People buy cocktails, even at stupid prices. Today’s invention is a beer cocktail.

Consumers should be able to ask for a combination of several beers, so that each pub visit has an element of discovery about it. Popular hybrids could be given common names to make ordering easier.

This would be pretty easy to achieve, using bar taps and a metering unit into which a bartender could enter how much of what beers were required using a keypad.

This would also allow a pub-goer to order his or her favourite beer diluted with zero alcohol beer, in order to limit their intake of alcohol.

The bar would then issue you with a receipt for each drink, stating the amount of alcohol included (with a warning on your phone, as you approach the legal driving limit).

Some of the most popular combinations might be made available in bottled form.