Frustrated by not being able to send big email attachments? This drives me nuts several times a month.
Today’s invention is an email program plug-in which detects that your attachments are over the limit imposed by some sysadmin.
Rather than just telling you this (with no further advice), the program would automatically locate the files on your local server and insert the url into your email, so that the recipient could download at their leisure.
Vertical take-off planes have had vectored thrust engines since the sixties.
Today’s invention is to supply multi-engined airliners with jet engines mounted on gimbals, so that their thrust can be precisely controlled using electronics.
The jets could be mounted on upper and lower wing surfaces, since there would be much less need for all those complex, vulnerable and wing-weakening ailerons and flaps.
If you have some viscous fluid between two concentric, rotating cylinders, blobs of dye in it will be smeared out -but then re-formed when the movement is reversed.
Today’s invention uses this laminar flow reversibility as an aid to security.
An instruction about how to open a lock or access a safe can be printed in the form of a coarse, dye-blob message within the apparatus above. The cylinders are then rotated backwards and forwards in a sequence of moves known only to those authorised to access the system.
Such a person can walk up (seeing only an indecipherable smear), reverse the moves and read the secondary message (which might be a vault or pin code).
The fluid would then be flushed and the access details rewritten with a new sequence of moves for the next person.
Today’s invention is (yet) another way for people to escape from skyscrapers in an emergency.
Since these buildings tend to cluster together in city centres, if there is a fire in one, the idea is to run cables onto the roofs of surrounding, shorter towers.
These cables would connected to several other neighbouring buildings and be embedded in walls and ground surfaces.
In an escape situation, the cables would be rapidly tightened (using winches or dropweights) and a sequence of previously attached, window-sized pods would be filled with people and slid down the cables to comparative safety.
It seems that there is still a significant amount of automated financial trading taking place, despite uncertainty about the instabilities which this may exacerbate in the world’s stockmarkets.
New work at MIT indicates that one can optimise trading performance by locating your machine halfway between market servers to exploit tiny fluctuations in prices.
Today’s invention takes this ridiculous practice to even greater extremes.
In order to exchange data with trading floors faster, it involves placing your automatic trading machine at the bottom of a vertical shaft, dug at one of the hotspots indicated in the research.
This machine would not rely on optical fibres but would lessen the pathlength by transmitting data in a straight line through the earth (using eg the mageto-inductive “Rockphone” technology, which can, it’s claimed, penetrate mountains.
The shorter path length would give you a nanosecond’s edge on the opposition, millions of times a second.
I’m disturbed by the number of times I come up with some idea to do with firearms. Anyway, today’s invention is an easier way to create a rifled bore ie without having to cut spiral grooves.
This involves driving a mandrel axially through a blank barrel. The barrel is then twisted around the central axis, to the point of slight plastic deformation, so as to distort the internal grooves into permanent helices.
The twistrate of these helices can be locally varied so as to optimise the rotational acceleration of the projectile being fired (ie as a function of the varying gas pressure behind it).
Carrying one of those wire baskets around a supermarket, I like to spread the load as shown. I tend to grip the front edge of the basket and support much of the weight on my forearm.
Today’s invention is a clip-on foam device, in the form of one of those pipe-lagging tubes -but made of stiffer stuff.
This runs across the handle and down its side to the front of the basket, redistributing the weight and stopping any pressure-related pain in arm and fingers.
I was reading today about the AK47 assault rifle. It seems this has been adopted in such huge numbers largely because of its insensitivity to dirt.
Today’s invention is therefore a technique by which more accurate, and therefore less grime-tolerant, weapons can clean themselves.
The rounds used would include an occasional one with no bullet. Instead, the cartridge would fire a plug of wadding, soaked in cleaning agent, down the barrel, clearing out the detritus left by previous rounds and helping to keep the rifling suitably polished.
There are now at least three different degrees of skimmed milk easily available at my local supermarket (leaving aside the various goat’s and soya varieties).
Today’s invention is to transform this selection into a continuum.
It consists of a plastic unit into which two milk containers screw (one, say, red top (skimmed) and the other green top (semi skimmed)). A tap within the unit allows the relative amount of each to be regulated when filling a glass or pouring onto cereal.
In this way, the degree of fat present can be controlled continuously, and exactly to the user’s taste in a variety of different scenarios.
Today’s invention is a way for people to board trains and disembark from them without the trains themselves ever slowing.
Having trains stop is pretty inefficient and it also means that the only place you can get aboard is at a station.
Instead, the idea is to have a small, electrically-driven micro-carriage running parallel to the train itself. People could get on this, via a simple siding, get up to speed, and when the two vehicles docked, simply walk from one to the other.
The accelerating engine would then disengage and run backwards to its siding, to wait for the next train and its passengers. Obviously this requires that the accelerative micro-carriages have efficient drive mechanisms and are monitored rigorously to avoid collisions. Some might stay docked, to allow for extra flexibility (A super clever system would have a range of microcarriages which would feed passengers from walking to bullet train speed).
In this way, main trains could avoid the problems of variable speed and passengers could board or get off at any one of a very large number of intermediate locations.
