Today’s invention offers a way to ensure that one’s next bite is filled with delicious sauce, rather than just daubed with it.
A fork with hollow tangs has a syringe built into its handle.
This allows the fork user to pump sauce into his next bite.
The device might have a number of syringes, each with a different flavoured liquid/paste inside.
This also allows the amount of sauce used to be monitored and to be kept secret from other diners.
Aircraft carriers of the future will have smaller crews and be filled with a mix of UAVs and conventional aircraft.
They will still be large and vulnerable to attack.
Today’s invention lessens that threat by having the conning tower and control rooms of the ship mounted on a small internal railway carriage.
The layout of the track would be kept secret so that the location of the control centre of the carrier would be hidden, when below deck, and thus much harder to hit with eg a missile.
The Control room could be made to switch position rapidly, perhaps fast enough to actively dodge incoming attacks.
Motorcyclists spend too long thinking about their image, sometimes at the expense of their safety.
One example is that bikers with unused portions of their tyre wall feel bad that they don’t corner hard enough to wear down these ‘Chicken Strips’.
Today’s invention eradicates the dangerous temptation to lean too far into corners. It is in the form of a device at the tyre factory. This would undertake a final process in manufacture, during which the available tyre surface would be lightly abraded and re-textured so as to make it all look a little used.
This would be easy for the factory to do in a highly controlled way, slightly reducing tyre life but correspondingly extending rider life.
Today’s invention aims to increase the efficiency of (double decker) bus operations.
Bus shelters would be made double deckered so that people could board via a door on the upper or the lower deck of the bus.
This would result in faster loading and unloading at stops, as well as allowing more seats -due to the removal of the internal staircase from the vehicle.
It can be a pain to disassemble complex components to be able to give them a wire brushing on hidden or recessed surfaces.
Today’s invention attempts to allow this to happen effectively with everything left in situ and without having to spray sand or beads everywhere.
A flexible pipe is attached to a high pressure airline.
Air is blown down this, which causes a thistle-like ball of wire (blue) to oscillate in the airflow, restrained by a flexible cable (red).
This device can be pushed into place behind components (grey) so that the oscillations of the ball rub any flakes of dirt or rust etc off the surface.
Sometimes when driving or riding a motorcycle, you can see someone about to step off the pavement in front of you. Usually, they will be wearing headphones.
Sounding your horn may cause them to stop, but it is usually too weak and diffuse a sound -especially in an urban environment.
Today’s invention is a directable loudspeaker which a driver or rider can use to actively point at a particular person or group of people. This could be targeted also at an individual car, for example.
Another variant might be to redirect some of the exhaust noise or to add a loud, recorded verbal warning so as to augment the intensified horn blast.
If you go travelling or camping on a motorcycle, it’s great whilst the weather stays dry.
When it rains, everything has to be packed up and often reused, whilst still sodden.
Today’s invention offers a way to dry one’s tent or spare clothes during the next leg of your journey.
One person in your group would be equipped with panniers (red) which can have their front and rear faces folded in (and with drain holes in the bottom surfaces). This allows airflow during riding to blast through the wet material (green), drying it before the next stop.
This could also be adapted for use on a car’s luggage rack.
Many sports now require participants to wear mouthguards.
This includes team sports such as rugby.
The problem is that it’s hard for eg a pack leader to give instructions during play, when his mouth is obstructed by a lump of silicone rubber. Calling the required line-out throw, for example, can easily be misheard.
Today’s invention therefore consists of a gumshield with a loudspeaker, a battery and a processor inserted.
By biting down on the shield n times, instruction n can be barked out, with perfect diction. There could easily be 20 or so such standard orders and more elaborate patterns, eg involving tongue position, could increase the repertoire.
Players might choose to use the simulated voice of Ironman or one of the Transformers. In International matches, the accent of your opposition could be used to confuse them.
When watering houseplants, there is always the danger that the soil will be dry and that the water will pour through and overspill the tray under the plant pot.
Today’s invention avoids that problem.
It takes the form of a dish made with several circular areas which match the sizes of commercially available plant pot trays.
If your current pot has a tray which is the same size as the second smallest one in the dish (as shown), place the red plug as indicated and fill the inner areas with water.
This dish unit can then be held over the plant pot and the plug removed, guaranteeing that the tray will never overspill.
The fashion for standing desks has encouraged quite a few people to work standing up. Some of them feel better for the extra exercise this seems to provide.
Today’s invention extends this puritanical regime into leisure time.
Instead of allowing yourself to become a couch potato, in the evening tv watching could only be done when standing up. This would limit the wasted hours in front of soap operas as well as the damaging effects of lying about for hours.
The tv would be positioned near a corner of a room and placed on a pyramidal base, bolted to the floor. The tv would not be free to turn.
Given no means of placing even a stool in front of the screen, viewers would simply stand until they had had enough.
