A research supervisior of mine once explained that getting iron fragments from munitions inside the eye had blinded many servicemen.

Today’s invention is a way to use magnmetic material to help improve vision.

Imagine three (or more) contact lenses joined to form a strip of varying optical power and placed on the iris as shown. These would have tiny ferromagnetic particles moulded into the edge.

A set of small, strong electromagnets embedded in the (optically neutral) glasses frames could be switched on and off in sequence to translate the lenses across the lubricated eye surface and thus offer a much more flexible visual augmentation than any normal lenses or glasses.

Ideally, the change in lenses could be driven by detection of a long blink for ‘move right’ and two such blinks for ‘move left’.

It seems that significant numbers of people wearing earphones are so absorbed in their music that they step into the path of oncoming vehicles.

This will become an increasing problem when vehicles become electrically-driven.

Today’s invention offers improved safety for these people. It takes the form of a microphone mounted on the headphones.

When other people see you about to step off the curb at a dangerous moment, they simply say the word ‘HALT’ or some other easy, universal keyword -even if they are across the street.

The headphone system is programmed to detect and recognise this term and will at once issue a verbal warning to the wearer.

This might say “Stop MrX” or simply deliver a loud, simulated engine noise or screeching brakes to one ear.

In this way, an individual can be more safe because of the vigilance of the crowd around him.

Everyone who has ever had children travel in their car will understand what a total pain it is that they can never seem to do up their own seatbelts.

It takes children years to develop the dexterity and focus to strap themselves in and even then when you ask…”are you buckled in?” the answer can’t be fully trusted until they are about 25.

Today’s invention is a small speaker module which clips on to the buckle of a child seat. When the seat buckle is locked, a circuit is made that causes a sound chip in the module to emit a brief message -eg applause or a congratulatory remark.

This provides added incentive to a child to try to clip themselves in safely and also confirms for a parent in the front that this has been achieved.

The incentive might be further increased by having the module record and mention the name of the individual child in question.

There are some people who are still diehard collectors of vinyl LPs.

These folk will often have shelves packed with records (as shown in cross-section A).

Today’s invention is in the form of triangular inserts (pale blue) for the shelves (B).

Such additions would still allow the LPs to be conveniently stored, but they would also act as the absorptive surfaces of an anechoic chamber -providing a better, isolated listening environment for purist, old-school audiophiles.