Category: Possible inventions

Today’s invention offers a way to help ensure that statues don’t get sprayed with graffiti.

A statue would be made with a water pipe terminating at the top of the statue’s head.

This would be supplied via a pump at a rate that allowed a continuous, laminar flow of water to move down over the stone/metal surface.

An almost invisible, slow moving water film could be maintained by texturing the statue surface and by slow rotation of the supply nozzle in the head.

This would make any misguided attempt to apply paint extremely difficult.

It’s common to see buses travelling slowly side by side in city streets or parked in parallel.

Public transport is increasingly used to advertise movies, so that all the buses in a given district will carry the same adverts.

Today’s invention is therefore to apply a stereo pair of images to the back face of buses -to advertise a 3D version of some forthcoming movie.

People watching these vehicles would be able to cross their eyes a little, fuse these images and see a stereo advert.

This could be enhanced by applying the images to buses known to pass each other on certain regular routes.

Contra-rotating propellers are a neat idea in that they they can be arranged to generate no reactive torque when the blades spin up or down (and thus remove the need for a tail rotor, in the case of a helicopter).

One problem, however, is that the turbulence created by the upper set tends to disrupt the lift efficiency of the lower set.

Today’s invention attempts to lessen that problem by having one collection of blades which consists only of an outer(upper) length and another set which are shorter (and slightly lower), as shown.

The outer set’s speed and size can be chosen so that the best possile combination of lift and balance is obtained.

Astronauts currently have a number of exercise devices to which they strap themselves and undertake resistance training.

If we are serious about sending people to Mars, we need to think much more about how to counteract the physical effects of low gravity.

Today’s invention is to design a long-range spacecraft around the idea of a permanently simulated gravitational field…at least for people.

Each of the Mars-bound travelers would wear an aluminium exoskeleton, sewn into their overalls.

This would have a belt attached to a strap which could slide along, a groove in the floor -under a tension equal to the wearer’s Earth weight.

The exoskeleton joints would all be capable of detecting their orientation and when a limb moved ‘upwards’, the joint would resist that motion more than when moving downwards.

This results in a more normal environment and maintains fitness via ambient exercise of the muscles.

Today’s invention is intended to contribute to road safety.

If, for example, occupants of a vehicle have not put on their seatbelts when the engine is started, a beefed-up windscreen washer spray operates, whilst disabling the wipers.

Water is sprayed from the top edge of the screen and collected in a trough at the bottom…so that the water for this purpose never runs out.

The screen is thus impossible to see through and stops anyone driving away until the belts are properly attached.

A modified version of this approach would spray just enough water on the screen to force the driver to slow down greatly or stop, even with the wipers operating.

This might be deployed if a camera in the driver’s headrest spotted unfamiliar alphanumerics or other graphics in its image, which would be indicative of either texting or reading whilst driving.

People expend a lot of effort in removing hair from their legs. I’m not sure why they do, but I notice that my running tights are effective shavers…at least where the material rubs the legs.

In the left diagram, a section through a runner’s calf is shown.

Ginger hair is left in the concavities of the calf muscle and the shin.

On the right, a pair of running tights is shown with extra, internal padding at these locations.

The natural running motion allows these to do a good job of smoothing anyone’s lower limbs.

Today’s invention is a new form of glove for use in eg isolation cabinets or in spacesuits.

As well as a set of conventional mittens, for moving large loads with low precision, one’s suit would allow the hands to be withdrawn and the fingertips inserted into a kind of two-dimensional sea anemone surface within the suit.

This would be both transparent and highly flexible and used only for exerting tiny forces with ultra high dexterity. Each of the glove’s fingers would be prevented from swelling due to the pressure differential by a loose weave of fibres embedded within the material, but avoiding the pads of the fingers.

Only one’s fingertips need be inserted and these would have many possible options in terms of their optimal placement for the task at hand.

This arrangement would cause much less damage to a user’s fingernails and allow long periods of fiddly work to be undertaken with comparatively low stress.