Monday, February 15, 2010

Zapping Mosquitoes





It appears someone is beginning to take the human war on mosquitoes seriously.  The fact that it was so readily cobbled together is rather good news. It suggests that the next order of magnitude is possible and that works for me. 

The needs of the modern consumer are simple.  He wants to sit in his back yard in a fairly open place on a summer evening and relax with a beverage in hand.  It takes little to make him happy.

Lasers can protect a large cube around that consumer as a minimal design plan. 

Everyone else in the world wants the same protection, but right now a simple fifteen by fifteen by ten cube will satisfy plenty of paying customers who want their patios back for the whole summer.

Establish that market and the crest will follow naturally as need and funding dictates.

Using Lasers to Zap Mosquitoes
February 12, 2010, 9:16 AM


TED / James Duncan DavidAt the annual TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., Nathan Myhrvold presented a laser, built using common consumer electronic parts, that shoots down mosquitoes.
Can consumer electronics be used to combat malaria?
Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer, thinks so. His company, Intellectual Ventures, has assembled commonly available technology — parts used in printers, digital cameras and projectors — to make rapid lasers to shoot down mosquitoes in mid-flight. If bed nets are the low-tech solution to combat the deadly disease — caused by a parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people — the laser is a high-tech one.
He gave the first public demonstration of the laser, which was cobbled together from parts found on eBay, at the annual TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., which features lectures and demonstrations by experts in a wide range of fields, including technology, politics and entertainment.
After hundreds of mosquitoes (which were kept in the hotel bathroom until showtime) were released into a glass tank, a laser tracked their movements and slowly shot them down, leaving their carcasses scattered on the bottom of the tank. While the demonstration was slowed down for public viewing, Mr. Myhrvold said that normally the lasers could shoot down anywhere between 50 to 100 mosquitoes per second.
Mr. Myhrvold played a slow-motion recorded video that showed what happened to a representative mosquito. As the insect flew, a sudden light beam struck it, disintegrating parts of its body into a plume of smoke. It fell, even as its wings continued to beat.
Mr. Myhrvold said the software detects the speed and size of the image before deciding whether to shoot. It would reject a butterfly or a human, for example, and more powerful laser blasts could be used for locusts. In regions afflicted by malaria, the lasers could be used to create protective fences around clinics, homes, or even agricultural fields as a substitute for pesticides.
The idea was born from a 2008 brainstorming session held on strategies for killing malaria-bearing mosquitoes, a particular interest of Mr. Myhrvold’s friend and former boss, Bill Gates, who has made the illness one of priorities of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (to the point that Mr. Gates released mosquitoes into the audience at last year’s conference).
The idea of lasers — a miniature “Star Wars” weapons system — was thrown into the mix. “Everyone was like, ‘C’mon, be serious,’” Mr. Myhrvold said in an interview after the demonstration. After doing a little bit of research, he said, his team concluded that “this is feasible. We can actually do it. So we did.”
The breakthrough relied on understanding how the technology that guides the precision of laser printing could be combined with the image-detecting charge-coupled devices, or C.C.D.’s, used in digital cameras and powerful image processing software. Mr. Myhrvold said he thinks there is particular potential in the Blu-ray laser technology, because blue lasers are more powerful than red ones and there are a lot of them being made cheaply now.
He estimates that the devices could potentially cost as little $50, depending on the volume of demand. However, his company would not manufacture them. Rather, it built the technology mostly as a proof of concept. (Among other things, his company is also working on cooking technology.) Other companies would have to take the laser technologies to market, so the timeline for seeing the lasers in common use is uncertain.
The laser detection is so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted. “The women are bigger. They beat at a lower frequencies,” Mr. Myhrvold said. Since it is only the female mosquitoes who bite humans, for the sake of efficiency, his system would leave the males alone.

4 comments:

Frosty Wooldridge said...

In the first place, mosquitoes form an integral part of nature's food chain. To poison them, or eradicate them continues to be short-sighted, obscene, stupid and out of touch with the grand scheme of nature. God's highest expression turned out to be humans; but also God's worse mistake. At some point, when humans discover how eradicate themselves, all life on this planet can get back to normal. FW

Unknown said...

Frosty Wooldridge, you are crazy! Let frogs find different food! THey also eat many kinds of bugs. Mosquitoes NEED to be extinguished and obliterated! This invention is excellent! We need to rid the world of malaria once and for all!

arclein said...

I actually have a lot of respect for the role of mosquitoes in the food chain. A dive into a northern lake will leave you with a gelatinous coating of mosquito and black fly larvae. Clearly excellent natural fish feed to be properly exploited.

It is much better to create exclusion zones using tools like this here in which we are able to operate in peace. It also can be used to exclude most other insects who are not necessarily so troublesome like flies.

We already have window screens for dwellings. Been able to operate open air work spaces is useful.

The tech may be able to provide a personal exclusion zone like a cone although that will be rather more tricky. A helmet so rigged can at least be imagined, but practically impossible.

Frosty Wooldridge said...

CW needs to get a grip on reality. Humans are destroying the foundation of the web of life so fast, that at some point, we ourselves will find ourselves in great jeopardy. We're killing off the bees around the planet so fast, that at some point, they won't be enough to pollinate crops. Mosquitoes are no different. They are needed as part of the web of life. Instead of terming me 'crazy', you need to educate yourself as to ecological balance. We're already killing off 100 species of animals per day around the world from our poisons and habitat destruction. What's crazy is that we kill over 100 million sharks world wide each year and have been doing so for the past 20 years. At what point do we stop our mass slaughter of the natural world. You need to get a grip CW and so does humanity. This is the only planet we have and we are desecrating it along with all other life. Mosquitoes, I repeat, are good for you and the planet! FW