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In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation asked Intellectual Ventures to create new technologies that will not only fight malaria but will eventually eliminate this scourge of humanity altogether.

Basically IV is the other half to fat cats scratching each others' backs and the public is eating it up. Where are the measurable results? Why can't $40 billion stop malaria? Because it's mostly ending up in IV's pockets and being invested in Bill's cadre of companies, if the products actually work that's just an extra bonus.

Trolls like Intellectual Ventures also claim they are research labs: "Intellectual Ventures Laboratory discovers, invents & develops advanced technology solutions in a wide variety of fields"

Was Intellectual Ventures in the book "Freakanomics"?

I don't have access to that book anymore but I seem to remember that a very IV type company was in that book because of their anti-global warming idea.

Uh I think it was Superfreakonomics and they even brag about it. I would like to clarify that it's not 'anti-global warming idea' so much as a patent on how to engineer the temperature by pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool the planet.

It's through Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures company, with info here and I'm told they're actively looking for people to build the things -- but bear in mind that IV's whole business plan is to come up with great ideas and make money off licensing them, so it might not be cheap.

They would get much more funding if they could somehow get the mosquito to burst in to flames leaving a mosquito sized mushroom cloud in it's place when hit by the laser instead of just... dieing.

We should be demanding progress on that mosquito vaporizing laser demonstrated at TED by Paul Allen's company. It seemed remarkably free of "side effects" and would not put a dent in the overall mosquito population (at least not until the "Star Wars" space based global anti-mosquito laser netwok is set up). They claimed that they could manufacture it (in quantity) for $50.

I had Dengue fever last year and I'd buy one for ten times the price (I know that won't work for the developing world but hey, what can I say? I'm selfish and one less food source available for mosquitos the better for everyone).

Anyone out there know how to get this thing "kickstarted"? How much would Paul Allen ask for the rights?

It's through Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures company, with info here and I'm told they're actively looking for people to build the things -- but bear in mind that IV's whole business plan is to come up with great ideas and make money off licensing them, so it might not be cheap.

Well sure, this is clever and all... but I still prefer the shock-and-awe approach to mosquito control:

http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria.html

You can just f-fwd to the 12m mark for the craziness.

Dear sir or madam, could you tell me how much it costs to license that invention from Intellectual Ventures, the company of former Microsoft bigwigs? Why is no one using this technology? Could it be ... cost of licensing?

http://intellectualventureslab.com/?p=653

An interesting thorium reactor is the Bill Gates-baked TerraPower travelling wave reactor (video here) that burns fuel made from depleted uranium, natural uranium, thorium, spent fuel removed from light water reactors, or some combination of these materials in a localized fertile zone that advances through the core over time.

TWRs are sodium-cooled, but in a simple pool. It accomplishes reprocessing on the fly, without the need for chemical separation that is typical of other kinds of breeder reactors.

To me, what separates "patent troll" from "people with cool ideas and patents on them" is that one of them markets their product to people interested in developing them, and the other waits until someone else develops their product and jumps out and says "surprise!" More accurately, trolls try to claim the treble damages reward for "knowingly" infringing on the patent, despite the fact that the first anyone heard of the patent is the C&D after the product is already done and on the market. To keep the suspense up, trolls typically stretch patents in ways that nobody could have anticipated, and usually rely on the brain dead patent "continuation" mechanism to keep a patent application alive while adjusting it to fit what would otherwise be called prior art (PanIP's legendary rampage through the e-commerce sphere at the turn of the century was based on a patent "filed" in 1994 that was a continuation of a patent filed in 1984, meaning that all prior art had to be dated before 1984, even though the patent claimed to have invented things that were in use by others in the decade between).

I don't know how this company does their business, but http://www.intellectualventures.com/inv_main.aspx links to a blog at http://intellectualventureslab.com/ when you want to find out more about their patents. I'm sure if I put "shoot mosquitoes" or "mosquito laser" into google, I'll find that they've invented this, even if I have to "research" past the first page of hits (heck, they're even on the first page for "mosquito zapper").

A extremely detailed overview on this topic is available at the Intellectual Ventures web site (see http://intellectualventureslab.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Stratoshield-white-paper-300dpi.pdf).

But to answer some of the questions, raised below, the necessary SO2 ranges - depending on scenario - from 200K (enough to offset Arctic Warming and establish a positive albedo feedback loop for cooling) to 2M tons per year (for a full on global cooling process.

This works out to from 2/10s of one percent to 2 percent of current SO2 emissions world wide (half of which come from man made sources). Current SO2 emissions are well below those we saw during the worse of acid rain.

To put it in perspective, Mt. Pinatubo kicked 20M tons of sulfur into the atmosphere in the course of a few days.

There have been studies on the impact of an additional 2M tons of SO2 in the atmosphere and they show miniscule impact.

It should be noted that any geo-engineering scheme is short term and designed to buy us the time to make the switch to more efficient and lower foot print energy systems.

The folks proposing these plans accept that AGW is real, but believe the measures being proposed are Too Little, Too Late, and Too Expensive.

If folks are actually interested in learning more about this - rather than taking cheap shots as anonymous cowards - take a look at what Intellectual Ventures have on their web site:

http://intellectualventureslab.com/?page_id=258

I work at the Intellectual Ventures Lab where we work on inventions. While the patent system isn't ideal, we're certainly not the paragon of evil Timothy Lee makes us out to be. The invention we've invested the most in is a reactor powered by nuclear waste. We have over 30 scientists working on that now. We are developing many inventions to help eradicate malaria and have a team devoted to epidemiological modeling for that.

Intellectual Ventures has already paid over $330MM to inventors from its licensing work. We're inventors & we love invention. We're trying to create more ways for inventors to succeed at what they're good at. - Pablos.