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

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

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.

Toward Limitless Energy

This method was first proposed back in the sixties and was then not possible because laser technology was in its infancy. That is no longer true so we are now taking this idea as far as possible.

We are suddenly seeing many promising fusion technologies been funded and tested out. The shoe has dropped that tokomak is not the only game and it has so far failed to perform. This one is also a mega budget project that tests the limits of present laser methods.

It appears we are seeing more activity this year than has been seen the preceding decades, partly because of a fresh williness to carry a range of experiments and partly because modern simulation methods are giving both scientists and funders a new sense of control over the process. I mean they all look like they can work in simulation and the layman is not left mumbling to himself while he is asked to write a large check.

Of course, all these methods are promising, but will inevitably spawn details that also need to be overcome. This project is actually an oversized experiment and clearly a long way from a plausible commercial product.

Alternatives alike the polywell is naturally compact and if made to work, will look great in a large ship. And the focus fusion device looks ready to bolt into a starship right now. None if it will ever be that easy of course but we can certainly dream. At least the funders are now able to dream also.

Toward Limitless Energy

http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Toward_Limitless_Energy_999.html


by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) Aug 24, 2009

Chemists are preparing to play an important but often unheralded role in determining the success of one of the largest and most important scientific experiments in history - next year's initial attempts at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to produce the world's first controlled

nuclear fusion reaction.

If successful in taming the energy source of the sun, stars, and of the hydrogen bomb, scientists could develop a limitless new source of producing electricity for homes, factories, and businesses.

The experiment could also lead to new insights into the origins of the universe. A special two-day symposium addressing this topic, "

Nuclear Diagnostics in Fusion Energy Research," will be presented Aug. 19 and 20 during the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Scientists have been trying to achieve controlled nuclear fusion for almost 50 years. In 2010, researchers at the NIF at Lawrence Livermore National

Laboratory in California will focus the energy of 192 giant laser beams onto a pea-sized target filled with hydrogen fuel.

These lasers represent the world's highest-energy laser system. The scientists hope that their effort will ignite, or fuse, the hydrogen atoms' nuclei to trigger the high energy reaction.

"Chemists will definitely play a role in determining whether nuclear fusion reactions have occurred during this NIF experiment, which is key to determining whether the experiment is a success," says Dawn Shaughnessy, Ph.D., a scientist with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"The idea is that the lasers will fuse hydrogen particles together, producing neutrons," says Shaughnessy, one of many scientists who plan to analyze materials produced by the reaction. "We'll collect and measure the materials produced from the ignition and hopefully be able to determine how many neutrons were made. More neutrons mean that more fusion has occurred."

NIF Science Director Richard Boyd, Ph.D., says that the NIF facility will offer unprecedented opportunities to advance the field of nuclear chemistry, with a special focus on nuclear reaction studies and the nuclear reactions of astrochemistry, the chemistry of outer space.

"A facility like this has never before been available to do experiments in nuclear chemistry," says Boyd, who is also co-chair of the special ACS symposium. "We're going where people have never gone before, and that could lead to some exciting, and possibly unanticipated, discoveries."

The NIF building is ten stories tall and has the width of three football fields. The facility, which is 95 percent complete, has taken more than a decade to build at an estimated cost $3.5 billion. Next year, its 192 intense laser beams will deliver to its target more than 60 times the energy of any previous laser system.

Scientists in France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and China are also developing laser fusion facilities. The ones in France and China will be similar to NIF, but NIF will begin operating several years before the other two. The facilities in Japan and the U.K. will be less powerful than NIF; they will try to achieve fusion with a somewhat different technique than that used initially at NIF. None of these facilities could produce a dangerous condition, Boyd says. As soon as the target's fuel is expended - in just a few billionths of a second - the reaction stops, he points out.

Mosquito Wars

I could hardly resist this story. It is obviously possible and it also can also operate with discretion. Creating an exclusion cube is obvious and from even present state of the art fairly easy. I can envisage enclosing an entire building within such an exclusion zone. We still have a ways to go and it certainly will not be done with visible light, but the computer power and speed is sufficient now.

Most know about mosquitoes, but flies plague most farm facilities, and a system that excluded them from working facilities would be very popular.

Since the system can determine the difference between a male and female mosquito it certain that it can tell the difference between a human being and anything else.

The ability to erect four masts and create an insect exclusion zone would also be a major boon for animal husbandry. They are often plagued by insects to the point of been put of their feed. Providing an insect exclusion oasis around their water or some such locale would be rather beneficial. They would still have to venture out to crop fodder, but that is only a fraction of their time. It may even be possible to use mobile masts.

It also strikes me that mosquitoes can be controlled well by setting up fences taking advantage of the insect’s low flying behavior. It may be possible to prevent most traffic from a known swamp from ever reaching an urban area.

Anyway, it is a neat trick that is potentially a vast improvement over broad spectrum ephemeral chemical solutions.

Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers
Humans, Butterflies Remain Unharmed; The 'Star Wars' Connection

By ROBERT A. GUTH

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html

BELLEVUE, Wash. -- A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists proposed the "Star Wars" defense system to knock Soviet missiles from the skies with laser beams. Some of the same scientists are now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito.

In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light.

The insects survived this particular test, which used a non-lethal laser. But if these researchers have their way, the Cold War missile-defense strategy will be reborn as a WMD: Weapon of Mosquito Destruction.

Weapons of Mosquito Destruction

A new global arms race is escalating: the one to protect us from the mosquito.

"We'd be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of power," says Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist who once worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the birthplace of some of the deadliest weapons known to man. More recently he worked on the mosquito laser, built from parts bought on eBay.

The scientists' actual target is malaria, which is caused by a parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people. Ended in the U.S. decades ago, malaria remains a major global public-health threat, killing about 1 million people annually.

Efforts to eradicate the disease languished for years until recently.

Big-money donors like Bill Gates, the United Nations, the U.K. and non-profit such as Malaria No More re-launched the war on malaria, devoting billions of dollars to vaccines, methods of prevention and novel ways to kill mosquitoes.

"You can say we are very lucky -- the right place at the right time," says astrophysicist Szabolcs Márka, a Columbia University specialist in black holes. He has a grant to develop a "mosquito flashlight" designed to knock out the bugs' eye-like sensors.

Scientists around the world are testing ways of thwarting mosquitoes with microwaves, rancid odors, poisoned blood and other weapons that disrupt the sense of sight, smell and heat mosquitoes use to find their prey.

There's work on genetically altering a bacterium to infect and kill a mosquito, and a project to build a malaria-free mosquito genetically enhanced to overtake the natural kind.

There's also a researcher in Japan who thinks mosquitoes can be a force for good. He is working on transforming them into "flying syringes" that deliver vaccines with every bite.

The mosquito laser is the brainchild of Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist who worked with Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and architect of the original plan to use lasers to shield America from the rain of Soviet nuclear arms.

President Ronald Reagan embraced the idea in the 1980s, dubbing it the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Senator Edward Kennedy mocked it as "Star Wars." Eventually it became a footnote in history.

Its rebirth as a bug killer came thanks to Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft Corp. executive who now runs Intellectual Ventures LLC., a company that collects patents and funds inventions. His old boss, Mr. Gates, had asked him to explore new ways of combating malaria. At a brainstorming session in 2007, Dr. Wood, the Star Wars architect, suggested using lasers on mosquitoes.

Soon Dr. Wood, Dr. Kare and another Star Wars scientist teamed with an entomologist with a Ph.D in mosquito behavior and other experts. They killed their first mosquito with a hand-held laser in early 2008.

"We like to think back then we made some contribution to the ending of the Cold War" with the Star Wars program, Dr. Kare says. "Now we're just trying to make a dent in a war that's actually gone on a lot longer and claimed a lot more lives."

The scientists envision their technology might one day be used to draw a laser barrier around a house or village that could kill or blind the bugs. Or, laser-equipped drone aircraft could track bugs by radar, sweeping the sky with death-dealing photons.

They now face one big challenge: deciding how strong to make the weapon. The laser has to be weak enough to not harm humans and smart enough to avoid hitting useful bugs. "You could kill billions of mosquitoes a night, and you could do so without harming butterflies," says Mr. Myhrvold.

Demonstrating the technology recently, Dr. Kare, Mr. Myhrvold and other researchers stood below a small shelf mounted on the wall about 10 feet off the ground. On the shelf were five Maglite flashlights, a zoom lens from a 35mm camera, and the laser itself -- a little black box with an assortment of small lenses and mirrors. On the floor below sat a Dell personal computer that is the laser's brain.

The glass box of mosquitoes across the room is an old 10-gallon fish tank. Each time a beam strikes a bug, the computer makes a gunshot sound to signal a direct hit.

To locate individual mosquitoes, light from the flashlights hits the tank across the room, creating tiny mosquito silhouettes on reflective material behind it. The zoom lens picks up the shadows and feeds the data to the computer, which controls the laser and fires it at the bug.

In a video, researchers showed what happens when they deploy deadly rays.

A mosquito hovers into view. Suddenly, it bursts into flame. A thin plume of smoke rises as the mosquito falls. At the bottom of the screen, the carcass smolders.

There's ready supply of fresh recruits nearby, where an intern feeds a saucer of goat blood to a colony of anopheles stephensi, one species of mosquito that transmits malaria.

Not only can the laser target a mosquito, it can also tell a male from a female based on wing-beat.

That's a crucial distinction, since only females feed on blood and thus transmit disease. Males in the wild eat sugary plant nectar. (In the lab they get raisins.)

"If you really were a purist, you could only kill the females, not the males," Mr. Myhrvold says. But since they're mosquitoes, he says, he'll probably "just slay them all."