Keeping your digital accounts secure is a never ending arms race.

Computing technology increases in capability every year. For hackers with access to the latest, greatest computers and code, it is easier than ever for them to run through tens of millions of combinations of characters to discover your passwords.

What you thought might be a safe and secure password a few years ago may now be vulnerable to being cracked. And if your password can be easily cracked, how safe are your accounts?

Hive Systems has updated their "Time It Takes a Hacker to Brute Force Your Password" infographic for 2026. Here is the table showing how long a competent hacker would take to find passwords made up of various lengths and combinations of characters:

How easy it is for a hacker to crack your password depends upon how long it is and what combinations of numbers, lower case letters, upper case letters, and special characters you use in your password. As you can see in the chart, in 2026, if you're using eight digit numbers as your password, you might as well not even bother having one....

Summer is back with a vengeance. Escaping the season's heat is a priority for millions of people around the world. It's a big opportunity for any enterprising inventor who creates the next innovation to take the market by storm.

Sony's Kenji Ito is a great example of that kind of thinking. The inventor of the company's Reon Pocket device came up with a novel take on how individuals can keep themselves cooler in the summer. And with Sony's roll out of its new wearable neck cooling unit as summer heat hits its seasonal maximums in the northern hemisphere underway, the IIE team couldn't help but note the device is only designed to cool one end of the human body. Surely there must be an equally cool wearable innovation for chilling the opposite end: your feet.

Sure enough, there is! In 1994, Israel Siegel's U.S. Patent 5,375,430 for air conditioned shoes. But unlike Ito's neck cooling system, Siegel's innovation is not powered by batteries. Instead, his innovation harvests the energy from walking. Here's how the patent describes the technology behind the foot-powered air conditioning system for cooling feet:

A compressor-expander type cooling, or heating system, is incorporated into a heel of a shoe, and is powered by reciprocal gravity pressures upon the shoe which occur naturally during walking. The cooling system functions through a bellows compressor chamber and a separate bellows expander chamber. The movable walls of the expander and the compressor are placed opposite each other, and transmit opposing vector forces to each other. A movable heel portion at the bottom of the shoe transmits movement to the movable walls of the compressor and the expander whenever the person wearing the shoes steps on the heel. This expands the expander and compresses the compressor. A network of heat exchange coils, containing a low boiling point liquid, communicates with the expander, and functions as heat absorbing evaporator. Another network of heat exchange coils communicates with the compressor chamber, and functions as a heat delivering condenser. Depending on the locations the evaporator and the condenser networks, the shoe can serve as a foot cooler or a foot warmer.

Here's the patent's illustration showing the spring-like bellows incorporated within Siegel's innovative vertical sliding moveable heel:

The downside we see with this design is that these air conditioned shoes were clearly make for walking. They will only work to cool the wearer's feet when the wearer is on the move. Also, the sliding heel mechanism would provide for an unusual walking experience as it compresses with every heel strike and expands with the next step.

Still, inventor Israel Siegel did recognize there is market potential for such a device because battery-powered air conditioned shoes have made it to the marketplace. But as you'll see, they have since disappeared from it....

After a long day at the office, the feeling of peeling off sweaty socks is both a relief and, let’s be honest, a little gross. Did you know the 250,000 sweat glands in your feet can produce up to half a pint of sweat every single day? All that moisture creates the perfect environment for odor-causing bacteria to thrive. For me, the scent was weirdly specific, like sour cream and onion chips. It was enough to make me give up that snack for good.

The Hydro-Tech Cool Breeze shoes aimed to solve this by actively circulating air. They used a patented filter and micro-fan system to pull hot, humid air out and push fresh, cool air in. The idea was to keep your feet feeling clean and dry no matter how long you wore them. Packing that kind of tech into a dress shoe was pretty ambitious.

[...]

Here’s the tough news for gadget lovers. The original Hydro-Tech Cool Breeze shoes seem to have been discontinued. They were once sold for around $42 but have long since vanished from online stores. While the Japanese company Chiyoda still makes other Hydro-Tech shoes, the fan-powered models are a thing of the past.

Will air conditioned shoes ever come back? We think it's possible because we can see a concept similar to Sony's Reon neck cooling technology being incorporated into a shoe. We wouldn't count the idea of cooling shoes out just yet.

Inventions in Everything: The Archives

Since it's summer, we searched through the archives and found two inventions whose aim is to provide a cool, refreshing experience to combat high temperatures. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, both involve beverages:

• Inventions in Everything: A Cold, Refreshing, CRISPR Beer
• Inventions in Everything: Geothermal Beer Coolers

What can we say? It's already been a long, hot summer!

In 2004, biologist Jose Iriarte-Diaz conducted a legendary research project in Chile. Iriarte-Diaz wanted to study how dinosaurs moved, but their extinction some 66 million years earlier hampered his research. The closest he could come was to study how birds walk.

And there lay a new problem. Millions of years of evolution had so changed the anatomy of these surviving descendants of the dinosaur species of old that how they walk would be very different from how dinosaurs walked.

Take today's chicken for example. Here, evolution has conspired to significantly change the body of the species. Unlike their theropod ancestors, chickens lack long tails, which significantly changes their mass and center of gravity, which would have a big impact on how they move.

But then, Iriarte-Diaz hit on a genius idea. What if he could create a prosthetic tail for chickens, then train them to walk with it. He could then compare how both regular chickens and the prosthetic tail-wearing chickens move, where he hypothesized the prosthetic tail-wearing chickens would move like dinosaurs would have. Here's how a press release from the University of Illinois Chicago, where he finally published his research in 2014, described his experiment:

Studying a group of 12 domestic chickens, Iriarte-Diaz used modeling clay to attach a tail — a wooden stick — to the chickens two days after hatching. He changed the tail every five days as the chickens grew, then compared their movements to his control subjects, chickens without tails.

His research suggests that dinosaurs walked more like humans, with a vertical stance and most of the movement in the hips. Chickens without the experimental tails showed more horizontal movements, with the knees doing most of the work.

He also recorded video of the dinosaur tail-wearing chickens and uploaded them to YouTube:

In 2015, Iriarte-Díaz' and his colleagues' work captured the imagination of the Ig Nobel Prize committee, which awarded them the Ig Nobel Biology Prize for their published research.

But the story doesn't end there.

Flash forward to 2026. Allen Pan is a Science and Engineering YouTuber who has drawn popular attention for various devices he's created over the years. He wondered if it would be possible to build an articulated tail prosthetic device for a chicken that might be more realistically dinosaur-like than the static ones Iriarte-Diaz crafted for his biomechanical research. The next video presents Pan's development of the improved prosthetic dinosaur tail and the results from tests conducted with adult chickens:

Pan's 3D-printed articulating dinosaur tail resulted in a chicken almost immediately adopting the kind of dinosaur-locomotion methods it took the chickens that Iriarte-Díaz' and his colleagues' raised and extensively trained from hatched egg to adult bird to produce. It's not just a replication of the Iriarte-Díaz' dinosaur tail prosthetic, but a genuine improvement beyond it utilizing multiple levels of innovations.

In both cases, the dinosaur tail prosthetics represent a fantastic example of outside-the-box thinking.

Summer is here. For anyone who lives where excessively high temperatures and/or humidity combine to make the season a miserable one, that can mean a lot of sweating and personal discomfort.

Air conditioning technology makes many of these places tolerable, but that comes with a price. Because most these machines are big and bulky, using them to keep cool means having to spend a lot of time indoors. Because they use a lot of electricity, even so-called portable air conditioners are designed to be continuously plugged in to cool single rooms. They're only portable in the sense you can move them from one room to another.

But what if you could have your own personal battery-powered air conditioner? One you could take everywhere you go, including outside? Core77 describes one such product now being produced by Sony:

To stay warm in a cold space, you can either heat the entire space, or save money on energy by throwing on extra layers. But there is no opposite money-saving tactic for staying cool in a hot space.

Sony engineer Kenji Ito aims to change that. He invented the Reon Pocket, Sony's wearable personal air conditioner. It's essentially a tiny heat pump that creates temperature differentials using semiconductors. It's worn at the base of one's neck, and a metal plate resting against the skin transmits cool. While it won't change your body's core temperature, the device can cool your local skin temperature by an astonishing 25°F / 14° C.

The following video introduces Sony's wearable air conditioner:

The device works by using the Peltier effect, which uses electricity to generate temperature differences in circuits made of different materials, with one material becoming warmer as the other becomes colder. Or vice versa, since the heating/cooling effect on the materials can be reversed with the throw of a switch.

The device is already on the market in Japan and Europe, and will become available in the U.S. through Sony's online store sometime this summer. At this writing, U.S. pricing has yet to be set, but a unit will likely cost around $350 based on the announced pricing for Europe.

Once upon a time, in 2005, we wrote about Solare, architect Paolo Soler's ambitious concept of the Lean Linear City of the future, a city without cars and without urban sprawl. Robert Ipsen describes the basic concept of how a city might be successfully configured to achieve that result:

The first step is not design. The first step is choosing the spine.

The corridor comes before the city

The Lean Linear City is organized around an arterial spine. In the book, that spine is both technical and symbolic: high-speed rail, pedestrian circulation, utilities, energy distribution, civic access, and the shared metabolic infrastructure of the city are concentrated into a single linear system. The inhabited modules attach to it. Growth proceeds along it. The landscape outside it remains legible because the city has not spilled everywhere at once.

This is the crucial difference between a linear city and sprawl. Sprawl also grows outward, but it does so by multiplying roads, pipes, wires, parking lots, and private parcels in every direction. The lean linear form grows by intensifying a corridor. It accepts length while refusing dispersal. It says: if the city must extend, let it extend along a shared artery rather than dissolve into an asphalt mist.

It's the stuff of science fiction dreams. But in Saudi Arabia, it served as a foundation for a real-life megaproject: Neom. Here's a video introduction:

But it turned out to be a lot harder to execute than to draw up. The ambitious project has been severely scaled back. Matt Bevan of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News looks at what happened to the city of the future in the following 13-and-a-half minute video:

That report was in 2024. But is "The Line", as the Neom megaproject is known, really dead? The two percent of the project that wasn't defunded is still going forward. Here's The B1M's video report on the city's project from December 2025, which digs into the construction challenges of actually building the linear city:

As conceived, the linear city is a bold vision of what the city of the future could be. Given the challenges of making the project viable, it might always be.

The animated television show South Park has satirized many things over the years, but none more effectively than its creators' take on corporate business plans. Yes, we're talking about the "Underpants Gnomes" episode, which featured one of the greatest corporate presentations of all time!

Here it is, in all its technicolor glory and salty language (which is, of course, part of its DNA):

That scene with the Underpants Gnomes' business plan came quickly to the IIE team's mind thanks to the patented innovation we're featuring in this edition. Maria T. Portela's remarkable invention of Disposable Boxer Shorts, for which she received U.S. Patent 6,539,554 on 1 April 2003.

The patent illustrations don't really do it justice but here are Figures 5, 6 and 7, which give a sense of how the disposable material used to craft the undergarment comes together.

The patentable trick to making boxer shorts disposable isn't the pattern emphasized by these figures, but rather the material out of which they are made. The patent's description of its illustrations tell us exactly what inventor Maria T. Portela had in mind as she conceived her innovation:

A preferred embodiment of the present disposable boxer shorts is shown in an exploded front view in FIG. 1. It is comprised of a back panel 10, a right front panel 11, and a left front panel 12, all made of a strong cloth-like paper, such as the material used for making the paper towel sold under the trademark "VIVA" by the Kimberly Clark company.

At this point, we'd like to point out this is not a satire and we are not making any of this up.

Intellectual property attorney Gene Quinn was also quite impressed by Maria T. Portela's vision:

Essentially, these are boxer shorts made out of paper towels, but not just any paper towels. These boxer shorts are made out of VIVA paper towels. I personally would have thought that BOUNTY (i.e., the Quicker Picker-Upper) would have made a better choice, but what is objectively best is not what the best mode requirement is all about. To satisfy the best mode the inventor needs to provide description of his/her subjective preferences.

The "best mode requirement" is a legal concept that comes from a statutory requirement in U.S. patent law. To receive a patent, inventors must disclose what they think is the most effective means by which their concept may be put into practical application. Without that discussion, the patent would not have been issued.

We went looking to see if Maria T. Portela's patented disposable boxer shorts ever made it to the marketplace, and that's what ultimately led us to the Underpants Gnomes business model, which we modified for this product.

• Phase 1: Make disposable boxer shorts out of Viva paper towels.
• Phase 2: ?
• Phase 3: Profit!

Alas, we couldn't find any evidence of boxer shorts having been produced from Kimberly Clark's Viva paper towels and sold to consumers. We imagine the marketers at the paper products giant couldn't work out what Phase 2 needed to be to make disposable boxer shorts a mass-produced consumer product staple.

From the Inventions in Everything Archives

The IIE team has previously uncovered the following underwear-related invention, which involves quite different materials:

• Inventions in Everything: Bulletproof Underwear

This won't be our last time discussing disposable underwear. As part of our research for this edition, we came across another patent for disposable underwear, which may get a true shot at getting to the marketplace. We'll get to the story of that invention sometime later this year.

Going by Mars' calendar, the third quarter of Mars Year 38 (MY38) ended on Friday, 24 April 2026. Sadly, the Red Planet's nascent economy remained stalled with no new rock samples either drilled or stored for future export by the Mars Perseverance rover during the 146 (Earth) days of the quarter. Mars GDP' for the quarter is therefore $0.

The following video provides a very brief introduction to the work the Mars Perseverance rover has done that counts as Mars' only economic activity at its current phase of exploration.

At present, there is no feasible path for the export of the collected samples either stored on the rover or stored at a depot location on the Martian surface. Even the least costly proposals for a sample return mission were determined to be too expensive to execute with available technologies, resulting in the funding for continued development for it being cancelled in January 2026.

The following chart shows the economic activity generated by the Mars Perseverance rover since it has been on Mars, by Martian year and quarter:

The lack of a viable means to return the Perseverance samples doesn't mean those samples won't ever be collected and exported to Earth, but it underscores the failure in the original planning that left the sample return portion of the mission too poorly defined. The first missions that do return samples from Mars will almost certainly return the samples they collect using return launch capabilities they specifically transport with them.

For example, Japan's Space Agency plans to launch a probe to Mars' moon Phobos to collect and return a sample, building on the experience the gained from retrieving samples from asteroids. Meanwhile, fabrication has begun on China's probe that will return samples from the surface of Mars.

In other news, we may need to revisit our estimates of the value of the Mars' rock samples currently stocked in the Perseverance inventory and the "Three Forks" sample depot. An experiment conducted on the older Mars Curiosity rover on its drilled rock samples provided evidence of some very interesting organic chemistry:

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has uncovered a diverse mix of organic molecules on Mars, including chemicals widely considered building blocks for the origin of life on Earth.

The findings, which come from a chemical experiment performed for the first time on another world, reveal that the Martian surface can preserve the kinds of molecules that could serve as signs of ancient life. However, this experiment cannot distinguish between organic compounds from potential past life on Mars and those formed through geologic processes or delivered by meteorites.

Definitively identifying signs of past life would require returning rock samples to Earth.

Here's the paper where the findings were reported on 21 April 2026.

Our Mars GDP estimates are based on the estimated value of the rock samples collected for export by the Mars Perseverance rover, which are in turn based on the value of Martian meteorites that have been found on Earth that have not had similar evidence of organic compounds. Samples that do have these compounds will be substantially more valuable. Should any of the Perseverance samples have such a chemical signature, we will likely need to revise our GDP estimates upward to capture their greater value.

What that value might be has yet to be determined.

Increasingly capable Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are gaining steam in proving long-standing mathematical conjectures. The latest development involves a proof of another one of prolific mathematician Paul Erdős' 1,135 unsolved problems, but unlike AI's previous accomplishments in tackling part of Erdős' legacy, GPT-5.4's proof of Erdős #1196 appears to be genuinely novel.

The previous proofs by AI systems of other Erdős problems did not answer the question of whether the technology was bringing anything new to the table. The problems themselves could be considered "low-hanging fruit", whose unsolved status had more to do with the obscurity of the conjectures within the Erdős collection than their difficulty. When AI developed proofs for them, it more or less followed the playbook that mathematicians had established in proving other Erdős conjectures.

But Erdős' 1196th conjecture is not in that category. Mathematicians had previously taken on the challenge of developing a proof for it, largely turning to the tools of probability and statistics in the process. But instead of copying that approach, GPT-5.4 Pro found the path for proving the conjecture differently. Mathematician Terrence Tao offered this observation:

I had previously stated the opinion that the AI-generated proof had inadvertently highlighted a tighter connection between the anatomy of integers and the theory of Markov chains than had previously been explicitly noted in the literature. Based on further developments, I would like to update that opinion to the following: the AI-generated proof artefact, when combined with subsequent (and mostly human-generated) analysis, has revealed a tight connection between the anatomy of integers and flow network theory that does not, to my knowledge, have any explicit precursor in the literature (although related uses of Markov chains in adjacent settings do appear in that literature).

The development of the proof was verified using the Lean proof assistant, which we would argue is the secret sauce behind why AI technologies are making such rapid progress in advancing proofs to unsolved problems in the field. The pairing of the technologies is key to the advancement.

Getting back to the novelty of the proof, here's a comment by Jared Duker Lichtman, who developed the first proof of the related Erdős primitive set conjecture as part of his doctoral thesis in 2024.

In my doctorate, I proved the Erdős Primitive Set Conjecture, showing that the primes themselves are maximal among all primitive sets.

This problem will always be in my heart: I worked on it for 4 years (even when my mentors recommended against it!) and loved every minute of it.

[Primitive sets are a vast generalization of the prime numbers: A set S is called primitive if no number in S divides another.]

Now Erdős#1196 is an asymptotic version of Erdős' conjecture, for primitive sets of "large" numbers. It was posed in 1966 by the Hungarian legends Paul Erdős, András Sárközy, and Endre Szemerédi.

I'd been working on it for many years, and consulted/badgered many experts about it, including my mentors Carl Pomerance and James Maynard.

The proof produced by GPT5.4 Pro was quite surprising, since it rejected the "gambit" that was implicit in all works on the subject since Erdős' original 1935 paper. The idea to pass from analysis to probability was so natural & tempting from a human-conceptual point of view, that it obscured a technical possibility to retain (efficient, yet counter-intuitve) analytic terminology throughout, by use of the von Mangoldt function \Lambda(n).

The closest analogy I would give would be that the main openings in chess were well-studied, but AI discovers a new opening line that had been overlooked based on human aesthetics and convention.

In fact, the von Mangoldt function itself is celebrated for it's connection to primes and the Riemann zeta function--but its piecewise definition appears to be odd and unmotivated to students seeing it for the first time. By the same token, in Erdős#1196, the von Mangoldt weights seem odd and unmotivated but turn out to cleverly encode a fundamental identity \sum_{q|n}\Lambda(q) = \log n, which is equivalent to unique factorization of n into primes. This is the exact trick that breaks the analytic issues arising in the "usual opening".

Joshua Zelinsky offers perhaps the best framing of the accomplishment and what it could mean for additional progress:

Four things to note: #1196 is a decently well known problem. It wasn’t like Erdős-Straus level fame, but it is well known enough that I was familiar with it. Second, this is not a problem where no one had worked on it; there was a lot of prior work on it and closely related problems. Third, this is not example where the AI made small modifications to things in the literature or recognized that large parts of the problem were in an obscure paper. The approach the AI used is largely a different direction than the literature on this problem went. Fourth, and closely related to three, this proof does look like parts of it will inspire subsequent proofs because it really is going in a different direction which now looks likely to be a productive line of investigation for similar problems.

If this kind of progress continues, the productivity of AI technology in cracking unsolved math problems will be the biggest math story of the year. AI was already the biggest math story of 2025, but 2026 is shaping up to be even more so.

The 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas came and went at the beginning of the year. At the show, advanced electronics, communications, and computing devices tend to hold sway, but the 2026 show featured a new kitchen product that delivered something more: a range hood for venting smoke and fumes from stove tops.

At their most basic level, range hoods take on the role of a chimney for keeping the byproducts that come from cooking with heat or fire from filling the kitchen and all the other rooms of a home. Since the advent of modern electric and gas stoves, they typically include a fan to pull air up from the range top to a vent that directs the pulled air out of the home altogether. At the 2026 CES chow however, Arspura took the concept to a whole new level, replacing the basic fan of typical range hoods with industrial-grade airflow vortex technology to produce a much more effective design. The following video from their CES display introduces their InclindedQuadVortex (IQV) range hood:

The next video provides more insight into how the IQV range hood system works:

The combination of the air curtain in the front and the side panels helps the vortex engine pull air directly from the range top. Since the vortex engine is more powerful in generating air flow than a typical fan motor used in a traditional range hood, it is able to vent out the smoke and gases out from cooking much more quickly and effectively.

At present, Arspura's IQV is available as a kitchen upgrade product, whose main limit today is the need to install larger diameter ducting to accommodate its airflow. If it becomes popular enough however, that obstacle would be overcome as homebuilders choose to adopt it as a basic feature high-end kitchens, at first, and then in most kitchens in new homes.

HT: Core77.

There's a big market for products like flea collars that address the needs of dog owners who want to prevent their pets from picking up fleas and ticks when they're outside. There's an even bigger market for dog clothing for pet owners who would like their dogs to make style statements.

What if there were an invention that combined these two product categories? In theory, the inventor behind such an invention could benefit by claiming a small share of both markets.

As it happens, there is such an invention, although its inventor didn't quite realize its full potential! In September 1963, inventor Seroun Kesh of Detroit, Michigan was awarded U.S. Patent 3,150,641 for his invention "Dust Cover For Dog". Here's a colorized depiction of the patent's illustrations:

In the patent, Kesh describes the problems of pet owners he believed his innovation would solve:

It is well-known to animal lovers that dogs and cats harbor fleas and other pests and that the attempt to eradicate such pests oftentimes poses quite a problem. Efficient powders and sprays are now on the market for eliminating these pests, but their effective application and retention leaves much to be desired.

It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a device, which will greatly assist the animal owner, in the effective application and retention of such pesticides on the animal, for a period of time sufficient to do the work required.

Another object of the invention is to provide an animal covering of the character indicated, which will protect the clothing, rugs, furniture of the owner from damage, while the animal is being treated for fleas and the like.

If you look at the patent illustrations, it's pretty clear Kesh has not invented a dust cover for a dog so much as a full body suit for a canine companion. One that could not only be used for his stated purpose of keeping flea powder off the pet owner's furnishings, but could also work like a raincoat in keeping water and dirt off the dog, or even block fleas and ticks from being able to latch onto the dog. Add a fashionable pattern to the dog's body suit and the potential to make bank from the inventions was certainly in place, as a simple search for dog bodysuits on Amazon makes clear!

Including the flea suits and recovery suits for dogs, which are reasonably priced in today's market. Kesh's basic concept for his invention is a proven success.

That success includes another capability of the invention described in the patent. That strange tube on the dog's back near the tail has a specific function:

Another object of the invention is to provide a device of the character indicated, which is constructed and arranged, so that it may be used to help rapidly dry the animal's fur after a bath, by the simple expedient of attaching thereto the hot air exhaust end of a hair dryer device, whereby to permit the hot air to reach all parts of the animal's body.

That aspect of the invention can be found in today's dog drying bag, which works just like Kesh's concept.

It's not often the IIE team comes across an invention that, at first glance, appears to be destined for the annals of odd and unsuccessful inventions, but which after a bit of shopping research, we find is genuinely successful and is the inspiration for many products available in today's marketplace. The Doggy Dust Cover, and its modern descendants, is a rare exception to the rule!

Inventions in Everything: The Archives

The IIE team has gone to the dogs before, but only for just a handful of inventions. Here's that short list!

• Inventions in Everything: Toilets for Dogs
• Inventions in Everything: The Silliest Illustration Ever in a U.S. Patent?
• Inventions in Everything: Keeping Dog Time
• Inventions in Everything: Texting Your Dog a Treat

Tennis players looking to improve their game have a challenge. It's not always possible to find someone you can play or practice with when you have the time to go to the court.

Traditionally, this problem has been solved with the tennis ball machine. These tend to be pretty big machines that hold lots of tennis balls that are gravity fed one at a time into a tube. When the ball gets to a certain point in the tube, it encounters a set of fast-spinning rollers that accelerate and fire it out over the net where the practicing player can then return it. Fancy machines can alter the direction and the timing between ball launches.

Amazon features a number of portable tennis ball machines, the price of most of which starts around $1,000 and gets higher from there for all but the smallest and least capable machines. Given their bulky size and their cost, many players who use tennis ball machines will rent them.

But what if it you could shrink the size of a tennis ball machine enough that it could fit into a backpack? Or more ingeniously, is a backpack. One with a clever enough design that can hold as many as 100 tennis balls and your rackets? That could become an affordable option for a casual tennis player or a very useful kit for an enthusiastic player.

Hong Kong-based Nisplay Sports has done just that with their Y1 model, for which they've launched a Kickstarter campaign. The following video features tennis coach Henry So unboxing the Nisplay Y1 and demonstrating it. We've queued the video to start at the demonstration part:

As of 6 February 2026, the campaign has less than 30 days left to go, but has already well surpassed its goal. The campaign's Super Early Bird special is still available for HK $4,282, which is about US $549.

As long as men have been losing their hair, inventors have worked to develop ways for men to overcome their follicle deficiency.

The result is a surprisingly long list including innovations stretching back millennia. It includes hats, wigs and toupées, hair transplant procedures, "spray-on" hair, and even treatments with medications like minoxidil that can regrow lost hair.

But there's one patented innovation that tops them all. On 10 May 1977, father and son inventors Frank J. Smith and Donald J. Smith were awarded U.S. Patent 4,022,227 for their Method of Concealing Partial Baldness.

Here's how it's described in the invention's abstract:

A method of styling hair to cover partial baldness using only the hair on a person's head. The hair styling requires dividing a person's hair into three sections and carefully folding one section over another.

Today, that method is much better known as "the combover"!

The patent's illustrations reveal the method patent examiners considered to be so novel they awarded the Smiths a patent for it:

The patent describes how the method works:

The method here disclosed uses the remaining hair around the bald area on a person's head. The hair in this area must be extra long to cover the bald area. Generally the hair should be about 3 to 4 inches long.

To use the method of this invention, the hair around the bald area is divided into equal portions, generally three such sections will be used. The sections of hair used by this method generally will be to include equal sections on each side of the head and a third section on the back of the head.

The hair to be used as covering is brushed over the bald area in alternating folds using hair spray to hold the hair in place. The uppermost section can be styled to the person's personal taste.

Normally, after presenting our featured invention, we would seek to determine how successful it has been in the marketplace. But in this case, it has to be considered phenomenally successful because evidence suggests the arguably most famous person in the world today has deployed it in public for years.

Inventions in Everything: The Archives

Ready to sample more of the most creative designs and patents the Inventions in Everything team has explored? Our first edition of 2026 contains our full archive, celebrating inventions ranging from the whimsical to the inspired in reverse chronological order!

• Inventions in Everything: The Patented Combover
• Outside the Box Thinking: The Anti-Bandit Briefcase
• Inventions in Everything: The Naughty or Nice Meter
• Scary Chairs for Celebrating Halloween
• Outside the Box Thinking: The Double-Barreled Laser Flashlight
• Inventions in Everything: Creepy Dolls to Hold Cremated Remains
• Inventions in Everything: The Steam Man of Newark
• The Future of Transportation
• Outside the Box Thinking: Telling Time
• Outside the Box Thinking: A Golden Dome for Mosquito Defense
• Inventions in Everything: The Most High-Tech Hat of the 1890s
• Outside the Box Thinking: Flying Cars
• Outside the Box Thinking: Outdoor Drone Lighting
• Inventions in Everything: The Wearable Fire Escape
• Flying on Another Planet
• Inventions in Everything: A Bat for Picking Up Baseballs
• Outside the Box Thinking: Micro Geiger Counter
• Outside the Box Thinking: The Tale of the Tape
• Outside the Box Thinking: A Compact Air Blower
• Outside the Box Thinking: Fully Controllable Xmas Tree Lights
• Inventions in Everything: Beating Plowshares into Artillery
• Prediction Markets and the 2024 U.S. Elections
• Inventions in Everything: The Rowing Bicycle
• Outside the Box Thinking: The Ghost Chair
• Inventions in Everything: Glass-Encased Corpses
• Outside the Box Thinking: Navigating by Quantum Dead Reckoning
• Outside the Box Thinking: Anti-Fly Fans
• Inventions in Everything: The Urinal Headrest
• Inventions in Everything: The Greenhouse Helmet
• Inventions in Everything: A Corking Good Life Jacket
• Inventions in Everything: The Table You Wear
• Outside the Box Thinking: Horizontal Wind Turbines
• Inventions in Everything: A New and Useful Bandalore
• Outside the Box Thinking: The Flying Orb
• Inventions in Everything: Toilets for Dogs
• Outside the Box Thinking: Flying Robotic Firehoses
• Inventions in Everything: The Oreometer
• Outside the Box Thinking: Flying Umbrella Drones
• Inventions in Everything: A Patented Pre-Wright Brothers Flying Machine
• Inventions in Everything: A Better Lip-Balm Dispenser
• Outside the Box Thinking: Folding Coat Hangers
• Inventions in Everything: The Turkey Slapper
• Inventions in Everything: Belling the Rat
• Outside the Box Thinking: Solving an Inside the Box Problem
• Inventions in Everything: Life Support for Severed Heads
• Outside the Box Thinking: The Future of Automotive Manufacturing
• Inventions in Everything: The Levitationarium
• Outside the Box Thinking: The Lowest Lowrider
• Inventions in Everything: Water Talkies
• Inventions in Everything: Substance Dispensing Headgear
• Inventions in Everything: The Bug Zapping Tablecloth
• Inventions in Everything: Going to the Mat
• Inventions in Everything: The Snake Walker
• AI and the Twilight Saga
• Outside the Box Thinking: Fire Extinguishers - Part II
• Inventions in Everything: The Silliest Illustration Ever in a U.S. Patent?
• Outside the Box Thinking: Fire Extinguishers - Part I
• Inventions in Everything: The Stamp Licking Tongue Depressor
• Whales, Tails and How Far to Trust AI
• Inventions in Everything: The Snowball Shotgun
• Inventions in Everything: Santa's Ski Resort Holiday Ornament
• Solving Crimes with Turkey DNA Evidence
• Invention in Everything: The Truly Boneless Thanksgiving Turkey
• Inventions in Everything: The Most Rakish Trousers Ever Conceived
• Inventions in Everything: Tale of the Taco Tape
• A Tour of Art History (with Artificial Intelligence and Corgis!)
• Invention in Everything: Lighter-Than-Air Furniture
• Inventions in Everything: Mirrors for Reckless Fish
• Inventions in Everything: The Motorized Ice Cream Cone
• Inventions in Everything: The Imaginary Jump Rope
• Inventions in Everything: A Knockout Solution for Unruly Airline Passengers
• Inventions in Everything: A Pat on the Back
• Inventions in Everything: Counting Your Eggs Before They're Hatched
• Abraham Lincoln, Patented Inventor
• Inventions in Everything: A Five-in-One Kitchen Multitasker
• Inventions in Everything: The Bicycle Sleigh
• Inventions in Everything: The Santa Claus Detector
• Inventions in Everything: Sled Pants
• Inventions in Everything: Pure Nightmare Fuel
• Inventions in Everything: Carvable Artificial Pumpkin
• Inventions in Everything: Artificial Intelligence-Generated Patents
• Inventions in Everything: How to Comfortably Carry $1 Million in U.S. Banknotes
• Inventions in Everything: Lawnmowing Trikes for Tykes
• Inventions in Everything: A Third Eye for Smartphone Zombies
• Inventions in Everything: The Beerbrella
• Inventions in Everything: George Dempster's Innovation
• Inventions in Everything: Motorcyclist Airbag Suit
• Inventions in Everything: Patented Improvements in Cat Toys
• Inventions in Everything: Drinking on the Go for the Environmentally Conscious
• Inventions in Everything: The Hoverbrella
• Inventions in Everything: Inflatable Concrete Containers
• Inventions in Everything: Better 2D Maps of a 3D World
• Inventions in Everything: The Lost Patent of a Bold Man of Color
• Inventions in Everything: Bulletproof Underwear
• Inventions in Everything: A Blazing Trumpet Performance
• Inventions in Everything: Slanty Toilets
• Inventions in Everything: The COVID Candy Chute
• Inventions in Everything: Tomatoes on the Run
• Inventions in Everything: Serving Coffee By Drone
• Inventions in Everything: HM Flying Saucer
• Inventions in Everything: Airbags for Mobile Phones
• "Similar to Fireworks, But a Lot Cooler"
• Inventions in Everything: Dinosaur Jaw Pliers
• Inventions in Everything: Oddly Shaped Objects That Roll Smoothly
• Inventions in Everything: Has the Time of the Isolator Arrived?
• Beauty Within An Eight Millimeter Square
• Inventions in Everything: Opening Doors in a Virus Filled World
• Inventions in Everything: PAPR Made With Truck Parts
• Inventions in Everything: Coffee Cups for Astronauts
• Inventions in Everything: Mechanical Trees
• Inventions in Everything: Space Age Baby Delivery
• Rediscovering Nature: A Biomimetic Clock
• Chairs to Haunt Your Dreams This Hallow's Eve
• Ten Million Inventions In Everything!
• Inventions in Everything: Shoes for Defying the Laws of Physics
• Inventions in Everything: Treadmills Inside Your Shoes
• Inventions in Everything: Makeup Applicator for Cat Eyes
• Inventions in Everything: Optical Illusions to Enhance Safety
• Inventions in Everything: The Future of Ironing
• Inventions in Everything: The Sock Slider
• Inventions in Everything: A Cold, Refreshing, CRISPR Beer
• Inventions in Everything: World's Brightest Flashlight and Glow-in-the-Dark Paint
• Inventions in Everything: On Track for Ten Million Patents!
• Happy Holographic Halloween!
• Elevators that Go Up, Down, Left and Right....
• Inventions in Everything: Ice Cream Pint Lock
• Slow Dance
• Inventions in Everything: Training Device for Beer Pong
• Inventions in Everything: The Flask from the Future
• Inventions in Everything: The Music Playing Bag of Nacho Cheese Flavored Tortilla Chips
• Inventions in Everything: Floating Beer Pong Table
• Inventions in Everything: The Tree Transplanter
• Inventions in Everything: Stopping the Refrig-a-raider
• Inventions in Everything: Popping the Top on National Beer Day
• Inventions in Everything: Fishing for Boats
• Inventions in Everything: Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal
• Inventions in Everything: The Unwelcome Mat
• Hubcaps to Replace Snow Chains
• Young AIs in Love
• Inventions in Everything: Rolling on the Vinyl Tracks
• Inventions in Everything: Drilling Square Holes
• The Singing Stones
• Inventions in Everything: The Future of Furniture
• Inventions in Everything: The WiFi Wig
• Inventions in Everything: Keeping Dog Time
• Drying Clothes With Ultrasound
• The Future of Fireworks
• Harvesting Water from the Air
• Inventions in Everything: Automated Window Blinds
• Inventions in Everything: Flying Snoopy!
• Inventions in Everything: Texting Your Dog a Treat
• Houseplants from Avatar
• The Kitchen Unitaskers You Cannot Live Without
• Inventions in Everything: The Baby Cage
• Self-Carving Pumpkins
• Inventions in Everything: The Alarm Clock of Damocles
• Death to Mosquitoes!
• Reinventing the Axe
• Automated Zen
• The Ultimate Swiss Army Knife You Can Buy Today
• Inventions in Everything: The Toilet Snorkel
• There Is No Great Snowplow Stagnation
• The Ultimate in Rust Proofing
• Billionaire Drinks Sewage: Video
• Inventions in Everything: Antiterrorism Barriers
• Wrapping Your Bike Around a Tree... On Purpose
• Inventions in Everything: Geothermal Beer Coolers
• Inventing a Better Snowshoe
• Inventions in Everything: The Salmon Cannon
• Powdered Wine: Just Add Water!
• Fail: The Newest Innovation in Ice Cream
• Unlimited Virtual Legos
• Inventions in Everything: The Ultimate Turkey Blind
• Inventions in Everything: Turning Cans Into Sippy Cups
• Inventions in Everything: Anatomical Lego Figures
• It's Not What You Think....
• Inventions in Everything: Soup Bowl Attraction
• Inventions in Everything: Making Life More Difficult
• Inventions in Everything: The Oreo Separator Machine
• Air Shark!
• Markets in Everything: Stormtrooper Motorcycle Suit
• The Bike That Rides You
• One Inventor's Stick-to-itiveness
• High Five!
• Inventions for Everything
• The Best Mousetrap Ever
• An Invention for the True Wine Connoisseur
• Three of Ten Things You Don't Need on St. Patrick's Day
• The Future Just Got a Lot Cooler Than It Used to Be
• The Worst Piece of Design Ever Done
• The Magic Marker of the Future
• Coming Soon, to a Gym Near You!

At its core, the expression "outside-the-box thinking" refers to ideas that break out of the bounds of convention. This series features innovations that, somehow or another, do just that. In the case of today's featured example of inventiveness, quite literally.

Imagine you are carrying a briefcase as you walk in a public setting. The briefcase contains very important documents and valuable objects. Now imagine you've just realized that you're being followed by a shady character, who will soon make their move to take that briefcase and all its contents away from you. How will you keep from becoming just another robbery statistic? Better still, how will you avoid becoming the victim of an assault in the process?

Although it was never patented, inventor John H.T. Rinfret came up with a unique invention to address the problem of being robbed by thieves seeking to acquire briefcases and their valuable contents. Here's the story of his innovative "anti-bandit bag" from Atlas Obscura:

In 1963, The Manager and other publications described a spinoff—the Pug anti-bandit bag—that, rather than smoke, ejected the contents of a bag once a thief grabbed it.

Invented by John H. T. Rinfret, who was purportedly a frequent target of robberies, the Pug anti-bandit bag featured a spring attached to the handle. If a thief tried to steal the bag, the courier needed only to crook their thumb, and the bag flew open, its contents spewing everywhere. Presumably, this would frighten away the robber, and the day would be saved.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention and by this account, Rinfret truly had the need. The following video shows how his innovation, the Pug Anti-Bandit Bag, worked in action after its proverbial panic button was pressed:

Alas, Rinfret's innovation never reached the marketplace. Weird Universe theorizes why not:

From what I can gather, Rinfret hoped to rent his anti-bandit bags to companies that used couriers to carry important documents or money. He definitely put a lot of work into promoting his invention. He even came out with a new and improved version of the bag the following year. But evidently few companies were interested in using his bag.

Possible reasons why: 1) a bandit might pick up the money instead of running away; or 2) what if the spring was activated by accident, spraying money everywhere?

If you've ever had to pick up the contents of a briefcase or suitcase that wasn't securely closed and came open, dumping its contents on the ground, you well understand why Rinfret's anti-bandit briefcase never caught on. Even if it worked exactly as intended, you would be guaranteed to still have a mess to clean up. A mess that you could expect to have to deal with far more often than you might ever have your briefcase attempted to be stolen from you.

In that sense, it was too outside-the-box to be successful.