Here's what is probably a common experience for those who listen to broadcasts of sports events on the radio. You are happily listening to the commentary, when it is rudely interrupted by someone in the studio turning off the commentary and giving score updates from other matches. Now this is fine if you want to know those other scores, but it can be very irritating if you are concentrating on the match being broadcast. Television solves this problem by visually displaying the score...

Tired of raucously fighting and mating cats waking you up at two am in the morning? How about this dastardly scheme to keep cats in their homes at night - I am sure all cat owners will appreciate this one! I need someone to invent a mechanism whereby, when a cat triggers a tripwire, about half a bucket of harmless to cats but very indelible red dye tips onto the cat. Dripping with red dye, it wanders off home, in through the cat door, and walks all over the owner's carpets leaving a...

Cheap garments and footwear often wear out very quickly, so the savings made by consumers are illusory - they soon need to be replaced. Can we develop scientifically based measurements of the durability of garments and footwear, and include this information on labels? Then when shopping we can compare the durability of these items as well as the price. This would also force manufacturers to compete on durability as well as price. In Australia where I live the market has been...

A portable device to carry in a golf bag which can slowly shred up a golf club or ball to the accompanying sound of screams. Uses: self-evident to anyone who has played golf.

Problem to be solved - we need common names in the English vernacular for the distances 30 cm and 10 cm. The old imperial system of distance measurements included the yard and the foot. These corresponded well to the kinds of everyday distances that we often need to measure and describe. So yard and foot were popular and widely used units of measure and words in the English vernacular. Now in the metric system of distance measurements, the metre (meter in USA) corresponds closely...

How often have you rung a telephone number, an answering machine replies, and you hang up because you don't want to leave a message? Is it possible to design the system so the ringer is alerted by a particular ringing tone that an answering machine is switched on and will come on in say one minutes time if nobody answers the phone? We would then have the option of hanging up before the machine answers the call. It would save a lot of money. For example, in Australia where I live, if...