Category: Feasible inventions

The latest research on eating shows that multiple pieces of food are more satiating and rewarding than an equicaloric, single-piece portion.

Today’s invention is therefore a transparent plastic wedge-shaped segment, used for storing bitesized pieces of food in the fridge.

The wedges can be extracted from the fridge, or filled from a saucepan, and clipped together to form a varied plateful.

Each segment has an airtight lid. Eating involves opening only a few at a time.

Since one will feel full after opening and eating only a subset of segments, any unopened ones can be re-chilled for use later.

The segments which have been emptied can then be dumped in the dishwasher.

The four-poster bed has been around since at least mediaeval times. The canopy and associated drapes provided a room within a room which offered extra privacy and thermal comfort.

Today’s invention is a novel variant on this approach.

A bed would have a horizontal canopy with a vertical skirt of sound and heat insulating material.

When sensors indicated that the bed’s occupants were asleep (using cheap heartrate monitors) the whole canopy would move down to a much lower height above the bed to create a sound insulating, warm cocoon.

The height of the canopy could automatically vary throughout the night, in order to maintain an optimal sleeping temperature inside, and withdraw to full height just as anyone began to wake up.

In this way, occupants would be unaware of the bed’s behaviour on their behalf and central heating bills could be massively reduced in cold climates.

Odd as it may seem, I get most of my ideas whilst lying in bed. Other people I know are at their most creative when having a shower.

The time taken for them to wash is therefore only a tiny fraction of that spent in the cubicle. All that time, water is running down the plughole.

Today’s invention aims to reduce this waste.

It is a shower system which allows one to shower normally for the first five minutes. After this time, clean(ish) water is pumped from the shower tray and used to feed the shower in the usual way.

This offers a good combination of cleanliness, conservation and creativity.

Today’s invention is a program which is sensitive to the size of elements displayed on the screen of the device it runs on.

I’m thinking here primarily about maps, on which the route between start and destination is displayed.

In order to provide maximum detail, the route would automatically be rotated and scaled to fit the screen diagonal (as closely as possible, without chopping off bits of the journey).

Ants decide what category of work to do based on the numbers of different types they encounter. If they run across lots of foragers, they may be chemically signalled to become one too.

Today’s invention is an app which performs a similar function for urban-dwelling humans.

Wearing one’s phone with face-detecting camera facing outwards would allow a passive count to be made of eg smiles encountered during the day, or the relative numbers of different clothing colours (adjacent to faces).

It might even be possible to estimate the speed of movement of faces during a given day to arrive at some idea of the level of urgency among the inhabitants of different areas visited.

These data would allow one to understand what colours were in fashion and the mood of the local population, so that your own behaviour could be chosen to conform or differ -and without having to actively record any of these subtle observations.

Lots of lawnmowers have blades which flop out of the way when they encounter something like a stone or a twig. This means however that they can’t effectively cut thick grass, because the blades just yield much of the time.

Today’s invention is a ‘cowcatcher’ for mower-facing debris.

A v-shaped prow has a set of prongs (yellow), spring-loaded so they press gently and independently on the ground between the blades of grass.

As the mower moves through the grass, this comb will allow the herbage to pass through, but only stones etc of the order of a blade of grass in width.

Larger rubbish is deflected by the comb into the receptacles ahead of the front wheels, thus avoiding damaging the rotating blade.