Each week for over 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled the world鈥檚 weird and wonderful patent applications, digging out the most exciting, intriguing and even terrifying new ideas. His column, Invention, is now available exclusively online. Please send us your feedback.
Electric bullets
Ammunition that delivers a big electric shock without the need for connecting wires is being developed by the international security company, The Harrington Group.
Details are sketchy but parent company the MDM Group in Santa Clara recently filed international patents for a 鈥減iezoelectric incapacitation projectile鈥� which are more telling.
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Many existing stun guns shoot a tethered dart at the human or animal target and then pump high voltage shocks down the wires. But MDM鈥檚 system, called Shockrounds, is wire-free. Instead, the rubber bullet has copper electrodes on the surface, connected to a filling of ceramic piezoelectric material.
When the bullet hits the target, the piezo filling is violently compressed and releases a shock pulse of at least 25,000 volts through the electrodes. This penetrates clothing and instantly stuns the target. The effect is enhanced by also filling the bullet with conductive gel that splatters and spreads on impact.
The lack of wires may help increase the range of such weapons and the company believes adding a shock to conventional 鈥渓ess-lethal鈥� ammunition will increase its ability to incapacitate targets without permanently harming them. The patent also suggests the ammunition could be used to fry computer or electronic equipment.
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Emails for small screens
It鈥檚 pretty infuriating to receive a long email on a cellphone or PDA with a small screen. But Motorola has come up with an answer 鈥� software that automatically creates a synopsis of the long text.
The new summarising software first discards sentences that are less than 5 words or more than 50. Then it looks for sentences containing words that frequently crop up in the text, or which the owner has added to a preference list.
Finally it sifts sentences which contain telltale words and phrases like 鈥渁ll in all鈥�, 鈥渟o to sum up鈥� and 鈥渇or example鈥�. The few remaining sentences that fit all the criteria are pulled from the long message, stitched together and shown on screen.
But one risk if the system doesn鈥檛 perform as people expect is that important messages could be deleted without being fully read. 鈥淏y the way, you鈥檙e fired,鈥� might slip through the net, for example.
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Pool with a twist
Playing pool could soon take on a whole new twist if an idea being patented in California catches on. The inventor, Carlin Ghahraman of Danville, reckons that watching pool has become 鈥渂oring and monotonous鈥� because good players sink all the balls too quickly.
So his idea 鈥� which he calls 鈥渇our dimensional pool鈥� 鈥� is either to have an area in the middle of the flat surface which rotates slowly like a record player turntable, or have a network of electric coils underneath a normal-looking surface. The coils would be fed with an ever-changing current to create a slowly rotating field that then affects metal hidden inside the balls.
Either way, the natural trajectory of the balls is changed. A straight shot curves and a curve shot may go straight. If the effect is regular, a player could learn to exploit it and perform previously impossible shots. If the effect is unpredictable, the increased element of chance could add to the fun.
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