Walking boots are now available in a huge variety of colours, ‘technical’ materials, weights and prices. It always bugs me though that when I strap on my old Karrimors, the heavily-cleated soles quickly fill with mud and don’t provide me with any more grip than a pair of Italian loafers (not that I’d ever wear these, even if they came in my size).

It’s perhaps not quite that bad, but there’s certainly some kind of ongoing design compromise by manufacturers so as to provide a certain amount of traction, at a reasonable cost but without destroying the surfaces of woodland paths and rock formations all across the globe.

Today’s invention is a new approach to walking boot soles. Instead of fixed cleats, I’m proposing an array of retractable studs (resembling about fifty short golf tees per boot). These would be made of eg tungsten and free to move independently up into the 2cm-deep base of the sole, but each would be mounted on a small spring. This would allow the sole of the boots to conform more closely to the local shape of the ground surface and thus provide much better grip. They might also give a certain extra protection from damaging impacts when clambering over rock surfaces.

Walking on a smoother surface afterwards would force more of the studs upwards and allow any accumulated mud/debris to be sloughed off (without having to wait the usual week for it to form dry cakes and fall away).

For getting heavy vehicles (eg tanks) across rugged countryside, articulated tracks have been the ‘obvious’ solution since about 1916. Tracked vehicles tend, however, to have to be pretty slow, or they shed their links in a way which must be terrifying for occupants in a warzone.

Today’s invention is a way to allow very heavy vehicles to move across open country quickly and smoothly (perhaps to deliver food or medicines under inhospitable conditions).

Imagine a vehicle like a railway locomotive standing on a pair of parallel, joined rails, as usual. Instead of requiring that these rails run continuously for miles across country, this vehicle is supported by only one such section of rail, which is about 50% longer than the vehicle itself.

The vehicle also carries another joined pair of rails, identical to the one on wich it stands. As it approaches the end of its current ‘track’, it pushes the spare section forward onto the ground in front and drives onto it. The original section is then automatically lifted from behind and readied for the next movement cycle.

It would be necessary to design the ends of the rails so that driving from one to the next could not result in derailment (by having them link together temporarily, even over very rough terrain). Significant gradients would also require a rack and pinion drive system to operate between the train and the active track section.

This panjandrum would allow only very gradual changes of direction, but the rails could support very great loads moving rapidly and not be vulnerable to local damage (by eg landmines).

When a vehicle comes under fire (whether it’s a limousine or a personnel carrier), someone may have glimpsed the direction from which the muzzle flash came (assuming they avoided being hurt) but it’s hard to respond fast enough to mount an effective defence.

There are also systems which attempt to detect the origin of the firing by listening for the acoustic source of the weapon’s crack. This is a tough task, given that there is usually a lot of background noise and that many weapons may be in use simultaneously.

Today’s invention is an alternative which might make attackers think twice.

Vehicles would be covered with two layers of mesh, spaced apart by a few centimetres. Each of these would carry a network of wires which could be used to sense the location of any damage. A round from a firearm would easily hole both screens and knowledge of the locations of the penetrations would allow a very fast calculation of its incoming trajectory, by an on-board processor.

Fire could thus be returned automatically, possibly even before the arrival of the next shot.

I’ve always fancied having superhuman powers. I suspect this is part of the motivation behind much of the research into robotic exoskeletons.

Instead of helping the disabled or allowing stevedores to lift loaded pallets single-handed, today’s invention is a repurposing of this type of unit.

Athletes of every kind, from joggers to Olympians, could benefit from wearing such a system during training. Rather than using it to enhance performance, it would actually inhibit easy movement, in a highly controlled way, and thus provide a convenient source of resistance training.

Each joint could be programmed to allow a particular force/acceleration relation -which could be tailored to optimise performance during some subsequent competitive event.

Such a system could be worn and used throughout the day, so that the training might become ‘ambient’ -thus overcoming much of the mental resistance which can limit training effort. A computer could provide several high-inertia periods during which training would be explicit, but alternate with bouts of lower intensity drag.

The suit could also rapidly sense any sudden change in its wearer’s movements, which might indicate the onset of injury in time to protect against further damage.

Office buildings are usually equipped with double-glazed units: large numbers of them. Triple glazing would actually be only marginally more expensive (around 5% extra, if you believe the brochures).

Today’s invention is a way to use this technology to brighten up both working environments and city centres as well as cutting down on the glare which often requires expensive sunshades to be fitted to buildings, post commissioning.

Each window would have a triple-glazed window unit. Only one of the two voids would however ‘contain’ a partial vacuum. The other would be narrower than standard (say 1mm thick) and have a small inlet and outlet pipe attached to the space.

The narrow space would be used to hold a thin film of liquid. This liquid could have dye added to it to vary the translucency of the window during the course of a day and from season to season.

The colour of the dye might be used to enhance the mood of the occupants of the building. At any rate, they could all vote, using a picker tool in a browser, for their choice of colour, which would then drive the dye injection machinery.

A skyscraper might even be transformed in this way into a massive, coloured advertising image (or a cellular automaton, if you prefer).

It’s tough to learn any musical instrument. I’m always so frustrated by the long period of amusical plunking, when learning the guitar, that I tend to give up -no point ‘practising’ something that’s just so bad.

Part of my problem is that how I experience the music in my head is not related at all to where my hands have to be to make it happen. I certainly can’t deal with having someone tell me how to move my hands…too many translations between modalities for me to make sense of the tuition. It’s generally true also that even a small misplacement of a fingertip turns the noise produced from perfect to unrecognisably discordant: the whole thing demands precision and gives no positive feedback for attempts that are ‘nearly right’.

Today’s invention is a tool which can help move fingers into the right positions repeatedly until those movements get related mentally to the sounds and the process is absorbed into motor memory.

The fingers are inserted into ten plastic tubes. Each tube is attached to the end of one finger of a robotic hand. Such hands are now just about dextrous enough to position a human hand, riding piggyback, accurately relative to the fretboard. The robot hand could be ‘taught’ how to play each required piece by being worn by an expert guitarist whose movements would be stored in the controlling computer as a pattern of reverse emf’s.

The system could in principle be used to ‘teach’ any instrument and might even be ‘tuned’ so as to emit the correct note (electronically, from an electric guitar amp) even if the finger positions weren’t actually perfect…so that a pupil would be less demotivated by the instrument’s sensitivity.