Category: Possible inventions

I dislike cutting grass. It needs to be done every week at least.

Today’s invention is an automated solution that lessens the associated boredom.

Imagine a system which consists of two small drones bolted together, but spaced a few cm apart.

The upper one of these machines carries the lower one around. The lower one then uses its blades to cut the grass as it follows the contours of the landscape (either pre-programmed or using real-time sensing).

One of the biggest pains in lawnmowing is carrying the grass to some waste bin.

In this invention, a large bin would be laid on its side at one edge of the garden.

The system would bank and blow the cut grass gradually into the bin, using its angled downdraught.

(Or you could program it to create eg a smiley face with grass cuttings left in piles).

Rules in motorsport are often made for commercial and/or safety reasons.

Today’s invention deals with rules that say ‘tyre blankets are not allowed.’

These tend to be used when there is limited opportunity to warm tyres safely by doing burnouts, or because they might give an unfair advantage to one team over another.

Winning race teams are always working to challenge rules like these, however.

So, imagine mudguards on a motorcycle which are made of transparent Fresnel lens material.

On a sunny day, just rolling a bike around the pit lane would provide a substantial warming effect on the rubber and allow perhaps one or two wins before the authorities banned them.

We now have software which can tell us the exact pattern of light intensity on any patch of the Earth’s surface, at any time in the future (not counting rapid urban developments and local weather behaviour, of course).

Today’s invention uses this program to allow farmers to estimate the statistically best locations for various different crops on their land.

As crops become increasingly genetically engineered to be diverse, and thus ward off disease, so their responses to sunlight may vary more. This software can take all these behaviours into account, so that the land area is much more nearly optimised for crop yield.

Traditional field boundaries may need to be altered to reflect light intensity distribution. Brighter farms might well become significantly more valuable than darker ones.

The same approach could also appeal to gardeners and allotment holders.

Imagine a walking stick with a gyroscopic disc at the bottom end. As the user walks along, the stick stays reliably upright and thus allows them to lean on it without falling over.

The problem here is that spinning gyroscopic discs tend to be much too heavy for a walking stick user to lift (I’m ignoring attempts to raise a gyro by turning it around the body, which don’t help much here).

Today’s invention fixes this situation by exchanging a disk for a long shaft (red). This would be located, using several bearings, within an outer walking stick shape (black). The shaft would need to spin at enormous speed to have the same angular momentum as a heavy disk, but we are already building experimental machines capable of a million rpm.

A user would be able to walk about using this stick and when the rotation speed reduced, due to friction, they could expose the shaft end (like a ballpoint pen) and place the end into a shrouded spinner (pale blue).

These spinners would be located on the floor within a home, work or public environment and could be mains powered. Each spin-up might take a minute or two, after which the shaft would be withdrawn and walking could again be supported.

Some stretches of roadway are well known for forming dangerous ice in cold weather.

This applies particularly to bridges and overpasses where the wind chill locally lowers the road surface temperature over the course of a few hours.

Today’s invention is a suggestion about how this may be alleviated.

Imagine if cars were fitted with exhaust pipes which could be blocked at the outlet, so that the hot exhaust gas could escape downwards instead. This would occur via a secondary pipe that could rotate from inside the car body so as to be close to the road surface, as shown.

This rotation could be triggered wirelessly by sensors in the section of road when the air temperature was beginning to fall. The movement of many vehicles would thus maintain the road temperature locally and avoid ice formation.

This has the added benefit that cars need not be as damaged by large amounts of grit and salt.

When you pay attention to your food, you tend to enjoy it more -and eat less.

Today’s invention aims to help people who want to lose weight by encouraging them to eat more slowly (and thus, I hope, more mindfully.

A translucent lid can be attached to any plate using a suction cup at its centre (grey) (You obviously have to avoid placing food at the very centre of the plate).

This suction cup incorporates a small clockwork motor which rotates the lid about the centre of the plate. The lid has a missing segment which allows access to only a part of the food at a time, so that it can be eaten more gradually than usual.

The time taken to rotate the disc through 360 degrees can be set by the user.

(Damn, I just remembered this, although it’s less clear than today’s idea. Back to the drawing board).

Humans seem to be unsettled by discontinuous time changes when travelling between continents. Today’s invention is a watch which automatically alters the rate at which it runs.

If you leave Melbourne, for example, at 4pm and arrive in Edinburgh at 06.30 that’s 14.5 apparent hours spent on a 23-hour journey. The watch would run 63% as fast as normal, providing the user with linear time progression on the watch.

It’s probably a good idea not to have a second hand, since we can easily perceive that this is moving rather slowly, but the lag in the minutes and hour hands would just appear to be the normal symptoms of impatience.

Once the (smart) device knows your flight number, it can slightly adjust its rate, taking into account any realtime updates, such as delays.

I did a quick analysis of flying from London and the only destination which would give serious perceptual difficulty is Seattle, which requires that your watch moves 9 times slower than usual (Vancouver has a factor of 5, which is I think on the edge of acceptable). I’ve found it hard to find references that say eg we start to notice that something is wrong with a timepiece when it moves faster or slower than a certain amount. Here is an article which makes it clear that this level is heavily dependent on context.

It may be that these apparent time dilation factors serve as a measure of expected jet lag…perhaps airlines should be giving discounts for flights with high factors?

As often happens with these ideas, I’ve just had another one on this theme. Imagine a smartwatch which can tell when you are looking at the time. When you aren’t, it displays nothing. When you suddenly inspect the face, the watch works out what the linear time should be and shows you that, as above…but now, it displays hands moving at the correct rates for a watch…so you don’t get the feeling that anything is amiss. You look away and the display switches off.