Today’s invention is an autonomous central barrier on a motorway -except that it’s not central.
Sensors count cars moving in either direction and adjust the barrier’s lateral position (a set of linked, mobile robot cones, shown in red) so that whichever side of the road currently has the bigger traffic flow gets the wider carriageway.
This smooths the movement of vehicles and reduces any tendency to tailbacks and jams.
Today’s invention is a printer which prints in a rhythmic way, so as to emulate the musical sound of drums in a band.
Users could choose the style of drumming, from pipeband to samba, even specifying this in the page setup instructions.
This would inevitably slow printing down a little but it would turn an unpleasant background drone into an engaging, user-defined ‘tune’.
When a floor is being mopped, signs appear saying, effectively, ‘if you slip, don’t sue us.’
These actually introduce a trip hazard, especially when placed at the top of stairs, for example.
Today’s invention warns people of wet floors, but creates no such trip problem.
A lightweight sign with a clamp type suction device is attached to the ceiling, instead (this could be done using eg a balloon, but would probably be too fussy and shortlived). The sign might be mostly transparent, so that collisions between passing pedestrians could be minimised.
Also, an extendable neck version might be made to help with varying ceiling heights.
Today’s invention is a way to deal with domestic broken glass.
Rather than fill the kitchen with a pile of fragments waiting to be wrapped in cardboard and dumped in the regular bin, there is a better way.
A glass jar is made just small enough to fit through the hole in a bottle bank. This jar has a glass, screw-on lid…no other materials are involved.
When anything glass is broken, the bits are gathered and placed in this jar. When the jar is full, it is transported to the bottle bank and the whole thing dumped in to be recycled.
Today’s invention is the transparent plugtop.
This allows the interior of an electrical plug to be viewed, so that a user can check that the wiring is correct before plugging in the attached appliance (there might even be coloured lines on the plug’s inside surface with which the wires could be compared).
The fuse rating could also be easily seen as well as any internal scorchmarks or cable fraying.
This could be incorporated in new plugs or as a replacement for existing plugtop front plates.
Today’s invention is a way to make office chairs roll more smoothly across office flooring.
Conventional casters (with wheel centre trailing the vertical axis) always seem to end up pointing in the wrong direction. This causes carpet rucking and a massive amount of extra, irritating friction.
The new approach has the chair mounted on a shallow, conical base with casters, as shown.
To move in a certain direction, first rock in the opposite direction slightly, allowing the casters on the other half to rotate around under gravity to align themselves with the planned movement.
Rolling onto these then allows the chair to be supported and move unhindered on aligned wheels.
Laptops are equipped with all manner of software-based security measures but that doesn’t count for a lot if someone can jab in a USB device eg and boot up your machine (If your BIOS isn’t password protected, for example).
Today’s invention is a simple device to make any such access to physical connections very much more difficult.
The diagram shows a plug placed in eg a USB socket and attached to a strap which passes under the machine and into a clamp fitted to the other side.
The strap can be locked in place, making attachment of any peripherals impossible without doing serious damage to the device or the machine.
If we can have bikes and trikes then why not an n-wheeled vehicle called a n-ike? (just waiting for the ‘cease and desist’ letter from the world of humourless chinese trainer manufacturers).
Today’s invention is a simple way to make a bicycle frame using wheels. Two would be used to hold the rear axle and the seat. One more would be clamped between these to hold the drive sprocket. A fourth would be clamped to this one to hold the steering yolk.
With the two on the road that makes six wheels in total. This arrangement offers lightness, ease of manufacture, a way to reuse old wheels and the possibility of personalising the riding geometry by changing the clamping positions.
I know almost nothing about the sport of Baseball (apart from the fact that it seems a lot more engaging than cricket or golf).
Undaunted by ignorance, today’s invention is an adaptation to the baseball bat.
This consists of several microphones embedded in the bat surface. When they sense that a ball is nearing for a hit, they cause a weight to be driven axially within the body so that the impact point becomes the centre of percussion. (The weight movement might be effected by eg compressed air).
This allows every impact to occur on a new, specially engineered ‘sweet-spot’.
Even if it doesn’t conform to the rules of competition, it might be useful to novice players, removing the jarring and pain caused by hitting the ball with the wrong part of the bat in training.
In space, no-one can hear you scream…so today’s invention is 3-D hearing for spacewalkers.
The number of people who work in the near vacuum of space is set to increase. These people hear only radio transmissions, the sounds of their suits and their own physiology.
First, equip each spacewalker’s helmet with stereo headphones. All astronauts, and anything movable, would be fitted with a small transmitter sending out a chirp of radio every second or so. These transmissions would be unique to the source person or object.
A processor aboard the Astro’s helmet would receive these and translate them into characteristic, realistic noises in stereo (an approach from the seven o’clock position by a friend or a passing robot arm could be perceived in advance, thus boosting safety and general ‘situation awareness’.
Toolboxes drifting off would soon be detected by their simulated wooshing into the distance as well as an occasional plaintive cry of ‘help’.
The headphones would also drown out one’s stomach rumblings when it’s time for that dehydrated stew, again.
