Various female athletes I know object to shaving their legs when going running in shorts -and yet don’t want to be stared at by morons who seem to think hair is evil.

Today’s invention is a pair of training tights which can be worn on the lower legs. These have an open-weave construction and are held in position at the top and bottom by elastic loops around knee and ankle.

The tights have circumferential bands of heavier fabric. During running, hairs naturally poke through the weave and as the weighted rings oscillate vertically, under the normal running action, the hairs are shaved off.

Wearing the tights during training runs at the start of the bare-legs season would be enough to automatically remove any leg hair.

I’m interested in the idea of a sub-two-hour marathon. The most common view seems to be that, if this is ever achieved, it will happen on a flat course.

It might be said that any hills on a marathon circuit add to finish times. When I plod around a much shorter, hillier route, however, I’m always aware that it’s a lot faster/easier in one direction than the other. In other words, the order in which any hills occur has a big effect on the completion time.

In particular, hills with a small, but sustained, upward gradient are good to encounter near the start so that the descent to the finish line can be used to boost one’s overall speed, when fatigued, nearer the end.

Today’s invention is therefore a marathon course specifically tuned to enable record times.

It would be designed with a number of sustained, gentle hills in the first half and a sequence of steeper descents towards the end. The precise slopes and their spacing could be determined from a programme of treadmill tests.

Once the best course profile was determined, this could be searched for among the known routes through cities or created synthetically inside a stadium, using multiple loops of an undulating, temporary track.

I couldn’t find this in the course of my usual patent searching, so here goes…

Today’s invention is robotic suitcases that follow the owner about. The cases each have powered wheels and sensors which allow them to form a (disconnected) line behind the owner -like ducklings (the owner would strap a sensor to his/her ankle).

This would allow rapid movement with more luggage than could be carried.

The spacing between cases could be automatically adjusted to cope with crowd conditions. If they were scattered by pressing crowds, they would automatically reform (like BOIDS) or, if separated by too great a distance, they might stop and issue an alarm.

We hear a lot these days about e-learning and gamification.

Today’s invention incorporates both these elements into a system to help students.

A laptop DVD drive would be fitted with a shallow cylindrical box, full of flat circular sweets (these sweets would be arranged in a spiral and pressed towards a small aperture in the box using a spring, in a similar way to rounds in a drum magazine).

On completion of some on-screen task, the drive would rotate the box so that the aperture in its base arrived at a specified location and then the drive would be opened.

Having arranged for the aperture to be unobstructed by the drive base, this would allow a student working on the machine to catch a sweet as it falls out of the box’s underside.

The drive would be closed and a new task begun.

I’m astonished that sometimes airliners dump fuel into the air without being involved in an emergency landing.

Even if it can be justified by virtue of the reduction in undercarriage damage, just spraying kerosene, especially over populated areas, can’t be acceptable in terms of human health or cost.

Today’s invention is a reusable auxiliary fuel tank for airliners in the form of a long flexible tube. This would have a valve at one end and a tough, wire-reinforced outer coating (like an offshore hose).

In flight, fuel could be drawn through the valve for use by the engines. If a landing was in prospect with too much fuel in board, several of these hoses would have surplus liquid from the main tanks pumped into them, be sealed and then extruded from the belly of the aircraft during the final approach to the runway.

The hoses, would impact the ground and flex, as in a parachute landing fall, spreading the shock as more of their length came into contact with the earth.

The hoses could be coloured for easy retrieval from the designated drop zone at an airport and multiply reused.