Today’s invention is an updated fortune cookie.
Each table in a restaurant is equipped with a microphone which extracts words from the conversation of its diners and selects a message containing some of these.
The message is then printed and placed in a freshly-prepared cookie.
Today’s invention is intended to support advanced rock climbing training.
Handholds on a climbing wall can each be inverted about a horizontal central axis so that they can’t be gripped.
This could be achieved by driving the rotation of each handhold from a central control room before ascent begins -perhaps making the available ones sparser as an individual climber’s skill increases.
This means that any wall can be made more challenging and variable from day to day.
The design of tyre treads, so that they shed water effectively and maintain grip in the wet, is something of an art.
Today’s invention takes a new approach to the problem in the form of an air blade for tyres.
Cars would have a series of nozzles located across each wheelwell. These would be supplied with compressed air so that, in rainy conditions, jets of air would be blasted onto the tyre surface (especially into and around the grooves) in order to detach water from the surface so that the treads have an increased opportunity to grip the road surface.
It won’t be long before printed newspapers cease to exist, at least as sources of paid-for news.
Until then, today’s invention is to leave a small semicircular section at the outer edge of each page unprinted, so that newspapers can be opened and closed whilst reading without getting one’s hands covered in newsprint.
This would represent a small loss of column inches but a major improvement in customer relations.
In honour of Apollo 11, today’s invention is a way for spacewalking astronauts to manipulate sensitive components, without their gloves.
A box with a transparent window has an access port at the top, into which a component (grey) can be placed and the hatch sealed. The astronaut engages both glove cuffs with the box and pressurises it using an air supply line from their suit (black).
The Astronaut can now remove the gloves inside the box, perform whatever task is required using bare hands (viewing through the window) and then reverse the process.
Although even the most intense camera flash is very unlikely to do permanent damage to anyone’s eyes, the effect can be pretty unpleasant at close range.
Parents especially get annoyed at photographers who fire off flash, even inadvertently, in the face of their baby.
Now that cameras are starting to routinely incorporate some level of face detection, today’s invention is to use that, together with the inbuilt autofocus capability, to sense when a face is closer than the minimum comfort radius and to prevent any flash under those circumstances.
Laptops: when actually placed on one’s lap they overheat the thighs as well as causing arm fatigue and backstrain.
Today’s invention is a mini lecturn made of recyclable cardboard which reduces both these problems, by placing the screen and keyboard in a more comfortable position.
The lecturn would be made in a single, foldable sheet.
Held firmly in place by sitting on the flaps, the ‘column’ on which one’s machine (or book, if you prefer) rests can be adjusted by tearing off sections along perforated lines in the cardboard at a number of different possible heights (and/or angles).
I was recently talking to an academic about creating ultra-cheap Fresnel lenses (ie << $100 per 1m sq). There is inevitably at least one patent in this field, but I believe the following isn’t infringing on that.
In a similar way to the form of old-style LP records, a sheet of plastic (transparent) would have one of its surfaces cut with a needle-like tool moving in a spiral path.
The angle of the cutter relative to the surface would change with time in order to generate the required refractive profiles in the groove.
This could make use of low-grade plastic (maybe even recycled material, initially repolished). No need for any injection moulding tooling; at most a pc controlling a relatively simple spiral cutter.
Today’s invention is a novelty in the form of a personalised cup.
The base of the cup is made so that when the liquid has been drained to a certain degree (perhaps by using a moulded-in straw), the remaining pools in the base look like someone’s face.
Clever moulding of the base, before attaching it to a standard cylindrical wall element, could even result in the appearance of a sequence of different faces, or changes in expression of the original one, as it is drained.
This would in effect provide the cup with a kind of internal film show mechanism.
I get irritated by finding all the big bits in my cereal box lying near the top. I’ve written before about the size stratification which occurs when collections of particles get agitated in a gravitational field.
Today’s invention attempts to overcome this.
Cereal (or any granular mix) is decanted into a box consisting of two joined halves. Each half has an openable lid and base. The combined box is shaken (perhaps using a mechanical buzzer device) so stratification occurs.
Then one half of the box is detached, inverted and reattached.
This allows small particles from one (A) and big particles from the other (B) to be mixed when pouring them out…thus maintaining a consistent distribution of sizes in one’s breakfast bowl.
