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Using Your Computer to Repel Pests
circletimessquare writes "A Thai guy wrote a program that uses your computer speaker to repel mosquitoes, cockroaches, and rats! Just when you thought you heard it all before (pun intended for no good reason). " Thats nothing- CowboyNeal can
repel all known lifeforms just by playing his massive collection of boy band
MP3s.
The software program they talk about can be found on (an almost all Thai) web site here.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
According to a colleague at Rutgers: .... Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that electronic mosquito repellers do not prevent host seeking mosquitoes from biting. In most cases, the claims made by distributors border on fraud.
Hand-held electronic devices that rely on high-frequency sound to repel mosquitoes have become surprisingly popular in recent years
While your downloading this software, if you buy a NYC landmark from me, I'll throw in a set of Mr. Chiu's immortality rings at no extra charge!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
It's not so much that they're designed to emit sounds humans can't hear, as it is that they can't really be designed *NOT* to emit sounds humans can't hear.
No matter what you do, you're going to be producing harmonics that may well lie outside the human range of hearing, and what with materials being imperfect, you could never perfectly limit the sound emissions to the normal human-audible range no matter how hard you tried. Even if you wanted to (and why?), there'd be the small matter of cost-effectiveness.
Paying an extra $500 per speaker just so your dog doesn't get to hear something you can't isn't really a good investment.
"So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand it's bee backwash."
As a PhD student in animal behavior, stories like this really irk me.
Although bats do emit ultrasound, only a few species of moths (the Noctuid moths) actually have the capacity to hear and respond to bat calls. They typically fold in their wings and just fall to the ground.
Mosquitos have no such hearing capacity. Repeated studies by scientists and the FTC have demonstrated that the ultrasonic mosquito repellant systems fail to work as promised. Those devices, and the program described above, may be fun to tinker with, but they cannot help you.
Mosquitos have no such hearing capacity
A simple Google search found this at Earthlife.net: Sound is very important to mosquitos for a number of reasons one of these is the location of mates. The antennae of male mosquitoes are sensitive to the sounds created by the beating wings of females of the same species. Because females are usually larger than the males, the wings of males and females beat at different frequencies. This makes it possible for males to distinguish females from males based on the sound of the beating wings and helps in the detection of females of the right species
So they do hear high sounds (and probably very faint sounds, too), though there is no mention of them actually recognizing their enemies from sound. There are lots of those electronic gadgets available, though.
- FF
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
(* which they chew and swallow but cannot digest. They explode in little blue puffs. *)
That reminds me of teenagers who steel raw sodium from chemistry labs, mix it with popcorn, and toss it all to birds at that beach. Once they get a taste of the popcorn, they come back for more, and the naturally-frosty-coated sodium resembles the popcorn. Thus, they mistake the sodium for popcorn, ingest it, and then explode in mid-air because the sodium hits water in their stumach. Tweet tweet Boom.
I wonder what the penalty would be if you are 18+ and caught?
Table-ized A.I.
For the troubled (ie lazy), you can see the page here (and download it from the mirror sites located at the bottom), bug proggie
(begin quote)
Scientific evidence shows that most insects, rodents and other animals hear or sense the same range of frequencies that humans do. If a sound or frequency doesn't bother us, it is doubtful that it will bother pests. In many cases, even sounds that bother humans may not bother pests! Further, since gerbils, hamsters, mice and rats are all closely related, anything that irritates unwanted mice and rats will seriously affect pet rodents.
Testing has shown that sounds emitted by ultrasonic and subsonic devices do not carry far, with about one-half of the energy gone in 15 feet and none remaining at 30 feet. Objects in the path of the sound block the signal create "shadows." Since insects and mice hide behind couches, chairs, refrigerators, etc., these shadows would render the device useless.
(end quote)
I used to work in pest control, these devices will work for a short period of time, but most pests will adapt to any set of sound waves you try to use. I watched one company install $800,000 worth of audio repelling devices, only to find mice living in the control box!