I don’t believe the stories I read on the breathier biomimicry sites that bullet trains can reduce their fuel consumption by 15% just by having a beak-shaped nose fitted.

It seems, however, that Japanese engineers wanted to reduce the noise made by high speed trains on emerging from tunnels and they used the geometry of a diving bird’s beak to achieve a large noise reduction.

Today’s invention is therefore a way to suppress the noise from a firearm, based on this dynamically-similar regime.

Bullets would be made axially asymmetric, as indicated.

Although they would be less stable in flight, despite the usual rifling, and therefore only effective at lower range, when used with a conventional suppressor, I’d expect a decrease in report of a few extra dB.

Today’s invention is a flying train. Well, actually it’s a plane with a fuselage in two parts: a cigar-shaped inner (blue) and a normal airliner’s rear section (grey) into which the front section fits.

On landing, the blue inner would engage with an electric railway undercarriage and take passengers and their luggage (or urgent freight) straight to some metropolitan centre.

The rear section could then be refitted to another passenger module when it arrives, at bullet train speed, at the airport.

Passengers would thus enjoy uninterrupted high-speed transport from city to city, allowing this hybrid transport system to fill the gap between trains and planes over medium-length routes eg in Europe.

When the wheels of a train press on their rails the local stresses are transient but enormous.

This is apparently a high enough pressure to cause plastic, ie permanent, cumulative deformation as each wheel passes a given point.

Once a crack has been created, subsequent stress will cause it to propagate and the rail will eventually require replacement.

Today’s invention is intended to prolong the life of our hard-pressed railway lines. It takes the form of an extra electromechanical control system for a train’s suspension.

Each pair of train wheels would be capable of being raised slightly, allowing the weight of the train to be redistributed non-uniformly from instant to instant.

Positions where cracks had already occurred would be mapped so that as a train passed over, the pattern of weighting and unweighting could be rapidly altered in order to minimise the bending moment tending to open the top face of the rail, for example.

This could mean that most of the weight would be thrown onto the nearest two wheels to a crack, rather than the farther ones.

If you need to shake lots of hands, perhaps when running for office, there is a degree of carpel crushing to endure.

Today’s invention is a slip-on fake cast which prevents people from doing that insane thing of expressing their need for friendship or dominance by trying to squeeze your hand to a pulp.

The appearance alone would deter keen crushers but an internal metal stiffener makes such behaviour fruitless.

For those people who really hate secret handshakes (as I do), it would also broadcast the fact that they were simply undetectable whilst wearing this device.

‘Tamper evident’ is a buzzword within certain sections of the packaging industry. The pop-up screwtop on jars of jam is an example. Similarly, businesses often have their electrical gear examined and a sticker applied which says ‘Checked, on date X.’

Today’s invention is another form of anti-tamper or safety verification technology.

At its simplest, this might involve taking and laminating a picture of the unmolested item and bonding this to its outer surface. The image itself might be modified of course, so a better approach is to supply any device which has a screen with an image of each of the device’s essential features in factory-fresh condition.

It becomes very hard for anyone to hack in and change the images themselves.

This might best be employed to prove to a user that eg a microwave oven’s safety mesh was intact, or that an ATM had not been interfered with by attachment of external devices.