Today’s invention is an extra safety feature for cars of the future.

Each vehicle would have sensors capable of predicting a collision with another one (eg by monitoring exterior air pressure for local spikes).

Seat units, each including an integral shielded footwell, would be suspended between floorpan and roof interior on a pole. Each pole would be locked in place within a network of tracks until a collision was about to occur.

Then, the poles would be freed to move along the tracks. Drive units would force the seats into a cluster in the opposite corners of the cars, thus keeping occupants from forming a crumple zone.

The cluster would take on a shape determined by the seats themselves, in their attempt to minimise the total potential damage to the passengers.

Some missiles which are fired to shoot down jet fighters, can apparently detect the position of the cockit and detonate next to the canopy.

As a countermeasure, today’s invention houses the cockit in one of the engine nacelles of a twin engine fighter. There would still be a decoy cockpit in the fuselage of the plane, as well as another engine.

A more advanced version would allow the cockpit nacelle and its wing to detach and act as a lifeboat for a pilot whose aircraft had been attacked.

Today’s invention is a tool which allows website commenters to leave sketches, doodles or hand-drawn symbols, rather than just text.

This would equip people to convey ideas which are difficult to express in words.

Even if they chose to draw stupid or obscene images, these would be much more easily scanned across and ignored, as necessary.

A sequence of such sketches might actually relate to each other, to literally form a bigger picture.

In honour of Graeme Obree, Today’s invention is a collection of devices which might be used to help a bicycle achieve 100MPH.

These include:
a) a low-slung frame with an integral aerodynamic helmet (blue)
b) a linear ratchet-type exercise device to drive the rear wheel by horizontal foot movement only (red)
c) an aerofoil used to give negative lift and force the rear wheel onto the road during initial acceleration (and subsequently discarded once the drag dominates) (orange)
d) A non-steering front wheel -to allow the necessary low frontal area (yellow)

I sometimes watch people setting up scaffolding and marvel at the sheer scale of the effort required. Those poles are heavy and a danger in themselves, if one should slip when being manually manoeuvred at a great height above the street.

They don’t need to be nearly as strong as they are -except when they are located at the base of the scaffolding, supporting all the other poles, men, equipment materials and kit.

Today’s invention is therefore to create two different types of scaffold poles. Red ones would be as per normal and used for the first few floors from street level. White ones would be exactly the same in outer dimensions but with a greatly reduced wall thickness. This would make assembly faster and less effortful, without compromising safety.

If anyone made a mistake and used a white pole near the base, it would be immediately obvious, even to passers-by (It might, however, be simpler to use white poles everywhere in the horizontal direction and red ones vertically).

A more elaborate solution would be to create a standard light steel pole and a range of external nylon tubes of differing thickness (and colour). This would allow a rainbow scaffold to be built with linearly-varying strength from bottom to top.

I have tripped over my laptop’s transformer many times, almost causing the machine to crash onto the floor.

Today’s invention is to redesign these bricks into a low profile wedge shape. This would be inherently harder to stumble on but, when wedged under a door as a stop, the chance of tripping is much reduced.

In addition, because the transformer itself is anchored by the door, catching one’s foot on the cable should result in detaching the cable from the box, rather than tugging the machine, or whatever, off the desk on which it’s parked.

I love the idea of emergence, especially when it applies to engineered systems.

Imagine a flock of miniature UAVs. These are programmed with the usual rules about maintaining a safe distance from neighbours whilst flying at the same speed and direction.

Today’s invention is to take this one step farther and to have individual drones fly so as to take up positions relative to each other eg “fly at 30 degrees 1-wingspan to the North, South, East or West of your nearest neighbour.”

During a long flight, UAVs could cycle through a large number of combinations of such simple geometrial variants, thus creating a huge number of possible shapes eg line astern, cruciform, 8 of diamonds, S-shape -both regular and perhaps irregular.

The critical thing would be that all the vehicles would be in constant communication, so that they would be broadcasting their current rules and other, resulting conditions (such as fuel economy).

This would allow the drones to try any simple behaviours which seemed to be working well for others. Just like a realtime genetic algorithm, this would attune the flock to varying flying conditions (eg when fuel is running low and heading into a storm, flying efficiently and less closely would be an experimental finding that was quickly and widely adopted).

Even in connection with those books not in digital format, unlicensed photocopying can be a problem.

Today’s invention is a simple fixture designed to make a real book much less easily copied, whilst not restricting anyone who wants to read the content.

It takes the form of a fine, but tough and flexible metal cable which runs around the outside of each book (inside the binding) and across top of the pages themselves.

This allows the book to be opened enough for easy reading, but makes it impossible to place it on a photocopier (even one designed for fast, semi-automatic imaging). Handheld scanners could still be used to allow legitimate recording of individual passages.

Any tampering with the cable would be immediately obvious eg to librarians or other lenders.