Today’s invention is to replace the progress bar on a computer screen with a series of frames from a comic book story.
These stories would be pre-written (or even created in realtime using the dreaded AI). The read-time of the strip would correspond with the estimated duration of the operation-in-waiting.
The preferred approach would help support comic authors, by royalty payments, whilst also entertaining people waiting for their download or installation to occur.
Living in Scotland it’s hard to find anywhere offroad to ride one’s motorcycle.
The country is owned by historic estates and many people seem surprisingly ok with being serfs.
Today’s invention is a way to get some offroad hill climbing practice.
A rubble conveyor of the kind used in road maintenance could run either sloping upwards or downwards. In fact, you could have a conveyor loop, since some of these incorporate bends.
Given that these belts can be wider than many country roads, one could ride along the boulder strewn belt without actually going anywhere, even as the angle was being varied.
Imagine a guard dog’s collar and chain.
The collar would have embedded sensors for sweat/temperature and pulse rate.
If the sensors indicated a high level of stress in the animal (as when an intruder appears), the chain could automatically be extended in proportion to the stress it was experiencing.
When you fire eg a pistol, the recoil makes your arm move all over the place (so the next shot can be way off-target).
Instead, the gun user should wear a series of electrical stimulators embedded in a long thin glove on his arm.
As trigger pressure is sensed, the stimulators jab the arm in a pattern across different muscles.
These cause reflexes to fire which get the muscles to exactly counteract the motion of the arm caused by the recoil.
Thus even the first shot can be better targetted but subsequent shots can be improved hugely. This could be adapted for 2 handed weapons.
Since this works by provoking reflexes, any conscious concerns of the gun firer, causing eg tension, are simply overridden (related technology has been developed to lessen spinal pain).
I’ve been inspired by watching ‘Sink The Bismarck’, an ancient movie in which biplanes contribute to the defeat of Nazism.
There aren’t many modern aircraft with this configuration…mostly because adding wings doesn’t work well in high speed flight.
In an application where strength and manoeuvrability are important (such as training) I can see a return to biplanes occurring, especially using modern materials.
Today’s invention is therefore a biplane whose upper wing can be detached in an emergency and which acts as a hang glider -to save the pilot in an emergency. This can be better than a parachute, because it can operate even when deployed at very low altitude.
This might be applied to high-wing monoplanes, but their extra speed might make things more difficult (to say nothing of fitting planes with a single, pilot-removable wing unit).
Some naval guns, intended to defend against missile attack, have a ridiculously high rate of firing.
These rely on people to preload shells into belts and then belts into magazines…which is labour intensive and not wholly safe.
Today’s invention is a bullet feed system based on this approach.
It would allow rounds to be gravity fed from a hopper, perhaps to several weapons at a time, whilst avoiding both over-complexity and jamming.
Today’s invention is a new way to provide a racecar with downforce in corners, but with zero increase in drag on the straights and minimal weight penalty.
The car has to slow, to some extent, on approach to a corner. It would achieve this by shutting down the normal four stroke cycle in a subset of cylinders.
Instead of ‘suck, squeeze, bang, blow’, pistons in these non-firing cylinders would periodically create intense low pressure regions when the valves are closed as the engine continues to rev.
The intake ports would then be connected via a valve/filter to the underside of the vehicle, sharply reducing pressure there, so that it is sucked down onto the road surface.
As the corner is exited, the normal four stroke process re-engages in all cylinders.
Today’s invention consists of two measures to make bank vaults even more secure.
The first is to place the hinge (red) inside the vault and to pressurise the interior, as in an airliner plug door. This makes any kind of externally applied force much less powerful in terms of opening the vault.
The second is to insert thermal tiles (orange), of the type used on the space shuttle, in the interior of the door (blue).
These are capable of resisting attack by eg thermal lance and, protected by the hardened steel skin of the door, cannot easily be mechanically or thermally punctured.
Anyone who succeeds in burning a penetrative hole into the vault would cause a jet of high pressure air to escape and ignite external equipment (or robbers).
Today’s invention is an addition to a conventional saloon car racing rollcage.
The two red members inside the roof would be made of larger diameter tubing and each contains an airbag charge and a length of extra tubing (green).
When a body angle detector senses that the vehicle is about to roll over, the bars are fired outwards on the falling side of the vehicle, through the windows, in order to stop it overturning.
Three bladed propellers on planes are more efficient but are less effective than four bladers as altitude increases.
If you want to have a prop-driven aircraft which can deal with both these competing demands, then today’s invention should help.
On the left, a twin bladed propeller is shown. On the right, it has rotated (and locked) two blades from behind the initial two, so that it now has four.
The same kind of arrangement could be made to work with 3->6 etc.
This switch between propeller numbers could be made to happen in flight.
