Home Archive by category "Possible inventions" (Page 78)

Category: Possible inventions

#1271: TiltTurn

I’m sick of hearing how the g forces on racing drivers require them to spend six hours lifting weights with their necks every day before selling some more after-shave and watches (and that they still have to strap their helmets to the vehicles during races, just to get around corners).

Today’s invention is a gimbaled driver’s seat which rotates during high speed cornering, so that a driver’s body is more closely aligned with the direction of centripetal acceleration, thus lessening any asymmetrical stresses and allowing safer cornering.

#1270: HueView

This questionnaire in which people were asked to name colours takes no account of eg the adjacent hues or edge conditions, but it’s fascinating, nonetheless.

The map at the bottom was surprising, since you might expect a more uniform, rays-of-the-sun distribution within RGB space. Instead, it seems many more shades are labeled red than blue, for example.

If it’s true that we can discriminate many fewer blues than reds, then this immediately offers a new colour image compression algorithm.

At its simplest, each pixel in an image would be assigned a certain colour ‘depth’ in terms of bits. Fewer bits could be assigned to local shades of blue than to shades of red, for example, in proportion to the areas indicated on the XKCD map.

This could be extended to optimise discrimination at the boundaries between adjacent regions of the map (so that more bits could be allocated to emphasise the difference between eg a yellow and an orange).

#1265: FlexiFlex

Today’s invention makes use of ‘plastic zip’ technology in resealable plastic bags. The insulation on each conductor also embodies a C-section side channel which can accommodate another wire, as shown.

This allows the formation by a user of ribbon-like cables. These can be very flexibly made into different combinations, and routed through multiple separate spaces or very flat apertures.

Cutting away parts of the C-section, allows the cables to link together to form conductors with a closed ring structure of three or more cores (in a triangle, square etc arrangement). This provides the resulting wiring with some added strength, as well as the ability to act as a conduit for other cables.

#1263: BarrAsh

Following the recent furore about volcanic ash in the atmosphere, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority has decided that 2mg/ m^3 is the airborne ash density below which it’s ok to fly.

Military aviators are a lot less cautious about air quality. They also have a range of countermeasures they can employ when being pursued by their opposition. Having seen the damage which ash can cause in a jet engine, today’s invention is a countermeasure based on this.

When followed by a jet aircraft, the target plane would start to inject some of its own ceramic engine outlet components into its exhaust stream, so that they burned (like an ablation shield on a space capsule).

This would periodically cause visible, dense puffs of silica ash (locally >>2mg/ m^3) to be ejected and cause any pursuing aircraft to avoid the clouds. The clouds themselves would remain airborne, a little like barrage balloons, until normal turbulence dispersed them.

#1262: SignalSip

Energy drinks apparently start to help one’s muscles work as soon as they make contact with the tongue.

That weird finding, via which the receptors of the tongue somehow inform one’s flagging muscles that ‘help is coming’, is the basis of today’s invention.

For those who find their lives threatened by exhaustion (such as soldiers, explorers or firefighters) it takes the form of a steel water bottle with a lockable lid (and an inaccessible, recessed valve).

The lid contains a timer device which opens a spout for say one second every half-hour (as determined for the operation concerned). This allows someone to take very short slurps of the sugar water inside, enabling them to keep going whilst preventing them from simply draining the contents.

It might even be possible for a version of the bottle to open the spout in response to radio signals from base, in order to maximise the chance that the bottle carrier can get him/herself back home in one piece.

#1260: Divertrack

What happens when a runaway train is careering down the track into the path of an oncoming engine?

Derailers are devices which can be carried to a place on a track and installed so as to protect eg people working in the vicinity. If a train approaches without warning it is automatically derailed (usually onto a fairly safe, flat patch of ground).

Today’s invention is a derailer which is carried by trains themselves and which, in the event of an impending crash, is rapidly lowered into place to allow the train to leave the track.

It takes the form of a pair of curved rail sections normally carried above an engine and hinged so as to be able to drop down in front of the engine’s front wheels rapidly and detach from the vehicle.

These could be made of some comparatively expensive but lightweight material and be long enough to direct the engine off the track, whilst leaving the rear section still on the rails.

#1259: Atissue

Sitting on public transport frequently involves me in being blasted by the sneezes of neighbouring travelers.

Fortunately, it turns out that there are now antiviral agents which seem to work in limiting the development of cold infections.

Today’s invention is a handkerchief which contains this anti-rhinovirus in powder form.

When you sneeze into the hankie, a wave of antiviral particles is projected off the other side and fills the space between passengers, limiting the power of the virus to make people ill.

#1257: SawSlots

Today’s invention is intended to lessen the effort required when cutting wood with a handsaw.

The side surfaces of the saw blade have slots machined into them so that a uniform, constant flow pattern can be set up in the narrow air passages between sawblade and wood.

This forms a ‘street’ of vortices in the slots which act as air bearings, reducing the drag in both forwards and backwards directions (air having low inertia, a reversal of this flow pattern is not particularly hard to achieve).

#1256: FareShare

Most people have an aversion to car sharing. Most people also have an aversion to fuel price-induced poverty…not to mention the damage which road transport does to the environment and our health. So we will increasingly have to choose to travel with other people (whom we may not know).

Today’s invention is therefore a modification to the electric urban vehicle of the future. We can get away with about 1/4 as many of these roaming the streets by building them so that they will only move when occupied by four people.

This could be detected by a hard-to-fake combination of bodyweights in seats, heartbeats recorded via seatbelt sensors and fingerprint-reading door handles.

To make a journey in such a vehicle, you would go to a stop and indicate your destination on a touchscreen. If you hadn’t bothered to coordinate with three friends, others waiting at the stop could then join you for parts of the journey along a designated route.

If someone got out before your end-point, you might have to wait at that stop until someone else wanted a ride on the same route. This alone would encourage people to finish an increasing proportion of journeys on foot.

Once these vehicles were in place, it might be possible for say two occupants to agree to pay a hefty surcharge to be allowed to travel without others on board.

#1255: Holdsmobile

Today’s invention is a new intuitive driving interface -something like a mouse moving on a mousemat.

A car driver grips a model car and moves it across the surface of a model rolling road inside the fullsize car. As the model car is turned, so the axial direction of the rolling road turns relative to the real car.

As the speed of the model is varied so the rolling road accelerates and the speed of the real vehicle responds.

A crude version of this could be achieved using eg an iPhone or Wii attached to the base of a model vehicle. It would be particularly good for people with a problem reversing or for those with physical disabilities (since there are no pedals etc required).