I’m still working on some anti-skid technology which will avoid the need to spray salt-laden grit all over any roads facing the possibility of freezing.

Aside from the huge cost and logistical nightmare of attempting to deliver the grit to the places predicted to be most at risk of ice formation, my real problem is that the salt prematurely destroys the road vehicles its supposed to be helping.

Blasting grit and salt all over the undersides of vehicles is an ideal way to encourage them to corrode (despite whatever sealing/ paint/ mudflaps may have been applied).

Today’s invention is therefore an underbody wash system not unlike that provided for windscreen washing.

This consists of a number of pipes down which clean water is pumped from an on-board tank. The water, which would be partly topped up by run-off collected from the car’s frozen upper bodyshell, would automatically be sprayed at the most grit-impacted regions of the car’s lower surfaces whenever the outside temperature was less than 0 deg C and the vehicle had stopped.

The water used might also contain some more active inhibitors eg vegetable oil.

It seems crazy still to be outputting print onto paper. It’s heavy, flammable and pretty much unsearchable in large quantities. Many people seem to be unable to read volumes of material on a screen, however, and so today’s invention is yet another way to restrict the waste that this involves.

Inspired by the continuous rolls of paper used to print receipts, today’s invention is intended to free us from the tyranny of the A4 sheet. When printing something to read, or pin to one’s noticeboard, a large proportion of the printable surface at the end of any document is blank (not to mention the page breaks themselves). Using a continuous roll of paper (rather than a trayful of discrete pages) would allow the end of the written content to be detected and the paper automatically severed at that point.

Any resulting documents would thus have a random physical page length -which would have the added advantage of discouraging filing the damned stuff (if you were absolutely compelled on occasion to work in A4, a simple full stop at the end of each ‘page’ would still allow that of course).

Today’s invention is a simple way to improve the security of a lock-and-key mechanism.

The door, or lid, containing the lock would be equipped with an array of identical keyhole plates, only one of which would have an actual lock behind it. All others would be decoys. The plates are cheap to apply and delay the actions of anyone speculatively trying to pick the lock, or of someone who has somehow obtained the correct key.

In addition, a special lock mechanism might be used (eg in a Yale-type lock) in which any attempt to turn or vibrate the internal cylinder, without first having fully displaced all the pins (in the right order), would cause an internal mousetrap-like device to snap shut on the lockpick or skeleton key, making its withdrawal impossible. This might also be used to activate an alarm.

I happened to have been looking at some Facebook entries when it dawned on me that all of those party/ concert photos of Miss X and her three best friends have a common appearance.

Today’s invention is a Facebook application which finds faces in the photos placed on pages. It then compares these faces with those posted by individuals on their pages. Names can thus be automatically be applied to the numerous group shots, without anyone having to type in all those identifiers as tags.

This would only be around 90% accurate, I reckon, but it would be a cool feature (knowing the name of someone you find attractive would allow them to be contacted, greatly adding to the social networking functionality). There might also be some some intriguing, or at least amusing, misidentifications.

An array of celebrity faces provided on the site could be used to answer such questions as, “which Hollywood star does my boyfriend most resemble?”

Having just watched the classic film LeMans again I was reminded of the dangers of carrying petrol around in a vehicle.

Today’s invention is an alternative way to transport petroleum spirit at high speed. Instead of sloshing around in a fuel tank, which, even with foam inserts, is bad for weight distribution/handling, the fuel would be loaded into cylindrical ‘bullets’. Refuelling a car would be a question of dropping a bandolier of such containers into a hatchway.

The bandolier would be engaged with a feed mechanism not unlike that on a machine gun. Pellets of fuel would be sequentially pierced (by a firing pin device) and drained into a small feeder tank. In the event of an accident, these discrete pellets would be very much harder to break open, making an explosive ignition much less likely.

If the vehicle were subject to a serious shunt, accelerometers might be used to detect this and to automatically jettison the remaining bandolier over the crash barrier.

Submarines captured my imagination first when watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Stingray in the 60s. Today’s subs can circumnavigate the globe, without having to surface, because they have nuclear power plants on board.

Even these high-powered monsters would benefit, however, from not having a giant conning tower sticking out of the deck. This allows the crew to see further when travelling on the surface but adds greatly to the drag when moving underwater and makes the boat highly visible when surfaced.

Today’s invention is a virtual conning tower. The submarine’s hull would be a single, streamlined torpedo shape with minimal protrusions. Instead of a tower, a small flock of UAVs would be released from the casing of the submerged vessel, break the surface and then fly at variable altitude and perhaps at a small distance from the mother ship.

These would be steerable from below, enabling advanced reconnaissance via onboard cameras (submarines can communicate subsea using radio transmissions at around 80Hz). The UAVs could be made effectively undetectable by radar and provide all the benefits, in terms of damage tolerance, of a swarm of aerial robots (at most, these might be seen as a flock of seabirds).

It might even be possible to have a tubular hull shift ballast so as to stand nearly on end in the water -acting as a temporarily high conning tower. This would also allow the diameter of the hull to reduced, cutting drag significantly.