Golf courses seem like a blot on the landscape to me, but that’s partly because I just don’t think much of sports where people don’t break sweat and walk about smoking whilst taking part.

Today’s invention is one way for golfers to help protect the natural environment (aside from staying in the bar).

Each golf tee would be made of biodegradable material so that If it went missing, as the balls often do, at least it would eventually return to nature. Tees would also contain a selection of indigenous seeds (probably grass). Every time a tee was used, pressing a ball on top would allow a few seeds to be planted in the ground, via the hollow shaft of the tee. I’d imagine using some kind of crude valve, such as those in saccharin tablet dispensers.

This might be extended to the spikes on Golfers’ shoes (or even to the cleats on the boots of mountain walkers and ramblers, which are a source of damage to the flora on country paths).

This way, golf courses would avoid having patches of brown mud everywhere. Use tree seeds and the whole problem of golf itself would eventually disappear.

There is an art to effective spring design. It can be very difficult to achieve the desired stiffness behaviour, especially when the available space is restricted and the deflection geometry hard to control.

For certain applications, it may be possible to consider using the repulsive force between magnets as an alternative to conventional springs. One such application area might be in providing people with energy return mechanisms for walking: spring heels, in other words. Various systems exist already but these tend to be complex, expensive and vulnerable to damage.

Today’s invention is to create a number of simple, articulated hinges (of the type used to support domestic doors). Each of these would be equipped with two plates of neodymium magnetic material. It’s possible to show that for heel-sized slabs of such magnet, the repulsive force between plates with opposite polarity would peak at about 500N. The 1-degree of freedom hinge would allow the springback behaviour to be controlled.

Although the impact force of landing on a single heel can be as much as six times body weight (say 6000 N) with a couple of hinges per foot a noticeable extra springiness would be experienced during normal walkng -resulting in less fatigue for eg soldiers, police officers, shop staff and post office workers.

The springiness could be disabled temporarily, if necessary, by flapping the hinges into the fully-open position with magnetic poles at maximal distance from each other.

It’s well known that people can’t keep count of a collection of things, once there are more than about four of them (in a straight line).

This is a practical problem for eg primary schoolteachers who have to lead a class of youngsters on a school trip, for example. One technique which is often adopted is to encourage them to hold hands with a partner…the thinking presumably is that it is much less likely that a group of two independently minded little people will disappear without causing some kind of noticeable fuss. Hardly an approach to security which a parent would find reassuring.

Today’s invention is a reflective harness of the type commonly adopted by schools but which has a clckable, child-safe catch attached to the front and rear of the waistbelt via a short lead. These can be used to attach one child to another in ‘indian file’ formation.

In order to help with safe road crossing etc, each harness could also have a clip on either side (with shorter leads). The harness on child n+1 could thus be rotated front to back so as to link with one side clip on child n, thus enabling a cross-linked two-by-two formation of tractable length (as well as linking children n-1 and n+2 etc of course).

I’m keen on bicycle design: especially features which keep machines’ handlebars in the hands of their lawful riders.

I once had a bicycle which wouldn’t fit into my van on the day we moved house, so I had to leave it behind. A small experiment saw it parked, unlocked, on a local thoroughfare to test how long it lasted before being stolen. The answer was less than one hour and this from within a forest of many other, fully-locked bikes.

It seems crazy to me that riders have to carry around extra legirons and chains and padlocks just to secure their steeds. Why not use the metalwork of the bike itself to help lock it up?

Today’s invention is to create a bicycle with a removable cross bar. With the bar absent, the bike is rendered unrideable, given that it would immediately bend and break. Each bar would have a large mechanical slot at one end, attaching it securely to the rest of the frame. At the other end, the bar would have an integral key mechanism, allowing only the bike’s original bar to be locked in place.

A bike owner, on leaving the machine, would detach the lightweight bar and take it with them (it would probably be used to hold the tyre pump internally, as well as a torch bulb inside one end). This would allow them to leave the bike anywhere, without needing to secure it to anything.

If you were the paranoid owner of a very expensive machine, you might choose to open the frame using the bar and lock it in place again but only after placing a telegraph pole through the triangular space.

I’m driving around in a car so old that it only has a cassette player (Surely I can’t be alone in thinking that CDs and cars never worked well together?)

Anyway, I’d like to be able to play my MP3 music via my ancient car hifi (but without paying a few hundred pounds to fit a whole new system in a car that will probably only last another year).

Today’s invention would enable that, by providing a cassette-shaped module into which any MP3 player could be fitted.

The module would then be inserted into any tape deck as normal. This would be engineered to pass MP3 output signals by electrical contact with the wires leading from the (now redundant) tape reading heads. It could also act as a case to accommodate the (detached) earplugs and spare batteries.