Invention Of The Day – Page 46 – Just another break-step productions sites site

#2411: SOSpur

People in a plane crash tend to underreact, it seems, due partly to peer pressure.

Nobody wants to be the first to leap from their seat and start bundling people down the aisles.

Today’s invention is a wrist band that would be provided to selected individuals dispersed throughout a plane.

The selection would be based on social media profile…so if you claim an interest in adrenaline-inducing sports or training in the military, you can expect to be issued one.

In an emergency, the cabin staff would send a signal to all of these wristbands in order to cause the fitter, better prepared individuals to take the lead and start escaping.

The signal might be in the form of a small electric shock -to ensure that people got the required impetus to move. There might be a variety of simple signals meaning eg ‘open the cabin door’ or ‘move people to the back.’

#2410: Barnacladding

Everyone knows that barnacles are bad for boats…they increase drag and may actually damage the underlying hull surface itself.

The shells of these creatures are incredibly tough and impact resistant. Today’s invention is a way to make use of barnacles as a natural protective coating.

Imagine a diving suit for people who have to work in shark-infested waters. This could have barnacle shells epoxied to its outer surface, away from the inner sides of elbow and knee joints.

If attacked, these relatively light shells would act as effectve armour…allowing a diver enough time to retreat to a cage.

#2409: BinRings

Today’s invention is a waste bin design which can be easily linked to similar ones in order to eg resist being blown over or knocked open by dogs (or, if you live in Canada, bears).

Each bin has a lid which can seal in the normal way.

When you open a bin’s lid, it can also seal a neighbouring bin, linking the two together.

A chain of such systems can close the loop, so that all bins are sealed and a robust structure formed.

The space formed inside the loop might be used as a chicken run or even a playpen for hardy children.

#2408: PistolPicker

Today’s invention is a magazine for firearms which allows the user to choose the kind of round to fire next (ie blank, high-charge,tracer, rubber etc).

The magazine would be filled with a number of different types of round, in order.

It would have a spring at either end, so that as rounds were extracted and fired, as usual, the remaining ones would be available to choose, by moving the magazine up or down. This movement could be controlled manually or motorised in response to a switcahable safety catch indicating which type to select.

This offers the possibility that eg a police officer could, without stopping to swap ammunition clips, choose to fire a warning shot or a rubber bullet, rather than have only lethal projectiles to fire.

#2407: Pillowheel

I’ve always admired this invention: the exhaust-inflated tyre change balloon -but you don’t see many of them in use at the side of the road.

Maybe it’s not that great an idea to run your engine with a restricted exhaust?

Anyway, today’s invention is an adaptation of the above idea but which doesn’t actually require the car owner to do any tyre changing.

The balloon device would be smaller than is normally required to remove wheels.

It would be inflated under the vehicle as usual but only raise it enough to lift the flat tyre off the ground -and then be sealed.

The balloon would have a set of small, ultra-tough castors on the underside. These would be able to turn under radio control, so that as you turn the steering wheel, the castors would help steer.

This system would allow a car to be driven home at low speed, so that anyone who was unable to change a wheel could still get back to base without waiting two hours for roadside assistance.

#2406: SpeedSkirt

I was wondering, when looking at the record breaking Mallard steam engine, if it could have beaten its own 126 MPH record with a more aerodynamic skin made of, say, alumninium.

Whilst pondering this it became evident that even our so-called high-speed trains have an enormous amount of high-drag undercarriage on show.

Today’s invention is an additional underskirt for railway carriages which would greatly smooth the airflow underneath the carriage and around its wheels by wrapping them in a lightweight tub.

This tub would ride on its own set of wheels (yellow), and have a gap at one end into which carriages could fit. This would allow rapid attachment and detachment for maintenance or to deploy them on the trains most in need of a speed increase.

#2405: Asturnaut

I watched a video today about donning a hard-shell spacesuit and realised that there are some upgrades that might be possible.

Today’s invention is the first of these.

Since an astronaut has to move his or her whole torso to look to the side, why not equip the helmet seal with the ability to rotate?

This turns the helmet into a kind of tank cupola which would be driven by a small motor to the left or right.

An arrangement like this might best be effected by having an optical sensor detect and respond to movements of dye spots applied to the wearer’s face.

#2404: Icillation

Icebreakers tend to be pretty large vessels.

Today’s invention would allow smaller ships to pass through icier waters than at present.

Imagine a large, slow-revving marine engine which can adjust its crankshaft so that all of its cylinders fire at the same time and with the crank in the same rotational position.

The effect of this mode of operation is to cause the ship to oscillate vertically in the water as it powers forwards.

In so doing, a set of large teeth on the bow saws into the surrounding ice, causing it to crack and allow the ship to move ahead.

#2403: Griprints

People are scared witless about identity theft online and yet we are remarkably trusting when introduced, face-to-face, that people are who they say they are.

Today’s invention would offer a first line of defence against scam artists, fraudsters and potential kidnappers.

To protect oneself, you would wear a couple of special adhesive plasters (shown as orange in the image but transparent in reality).

These would have a soft, skinlike texture (something like the remarkable anti-blister material, Compeed), thus making them hard to detect during a handshake.

Embedded in the surfaces would be a number of plastic-electronic fingerprint detector pads, wired to an earpiece.

If there was a mismatch between the name given during an introduction and the identity indicated by the prints, one would know to treat the meeting with extra caution.

#2402: Chronuts

Today’s invention is another way to make use of the Brazil-nut effect (a vessel, containing two sizes of particle, when shaken causes the largest particles to rise to the surface).

In this case, the idea is to show a consumer of tablets when they had exceeded their use-by date.

A container of medicine in the form of (white) pills would also have a population of larger, colour contrasting (red) spheres added to it.

On purchase, the container would be shaken for a specified period and then placed beneath an electric toothbrush charger on a bathroom shelf (these vibrate regularly, all the time).

This would cause the pills and spheres gradually to separate (at a rate determined by their relative sizes).

After some weeks, the user would look in the jar, see only red spheres and realise that his or her pills were too old to be clinically effective.