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Directed Energy Weapon Downs Mosquitos
wisebabo writes "Nathan Myhrvol demonstrated at TED a laser, built from parts scrounged from eBay, capable of shooting down not one but 50 to 100 mosquitos a second. The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.' Currently, for the sake of efficiency, it leaves the males alone because only females are bloodsuckers. Best of all the system could cost as little as $50. Maybe that's too expensive for use in preventing malaria in Africa but I'd buy one in a second!" We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the company has added a bit more polish, and burning mosquito footage to their marketing.
Well, to hell with the green movement... get me another 250 amp breaker box to my house! It's go time, you little bastards. I'm going to put some energy executive's nephew through college!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Woe be to the man who walks past wearing his fishing vest.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
And NOTHING ... I repeat, NOTHING ... is better than burning mosquito footage.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I'm from Minnesota, if this thing works that well I'll be tempted to pick it up and put it on a plinth in my backyard. Between that and my mosquito deleto I just might be able to enjoy a mosquito free evenening....
With one of these who needs Armageddon?
A useful, and frightening device. If the neighbors have one in their backyard, I don't want to be in mine. NIMBY , or let me have one on my cell phone.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I thought of this about a decade ago and have been wanting one ever since. Of course I've never had the time or money to build one... Sure, sell them for $50 a pop and I'll buy at least two.
..and a Roomba to clean up the mess, and you've got a party.
When will it be until mosquitoes evolve energy shields?
Student Research and Development
I love the smell of mosquito lasers in the morning... The smell, you know that burning insect smell... Smells like, victory.
The laser describes a perfectly straight line; no windage is needed. You therefore do not need to track the mosquito in three dimensions, but only two--no fine determination of range is required.
... is going to throw a fit. A pissy hissy little fit. Good.
Infuriate left and right
Great.. Now we can look forward the evolution of the laser-resistant mosquito!
...and that's a cute robot doll to shoot the laser at the mosquitos!
"Your donation of only $2 a day could help this African village purchase a mosquito defense laser . . . "
Not a typewriter
"Best of all the system could cost as little as $50. Maybe that's too expensive for use in preventing malaria in Africa but I'd buy one in a second!"
If it works as advertised (ok, ok, so we're in sci-fi land here with any product, but follow me for just a minute more), then it *would* be inexpensive enough for use in hospitals and medical centers, even purely by donation. Yes, nets work much better and are cheaper, but you could put this in the surgery room where nets would be impractical, or keep it in the triage room where people are in/out too much for nets to work particularly well. It wouldn't eradicate malaria, but I imagine it could seriously help prevent it spreading in a few specific situations that just also happen to be involving high-risk (for carrying/transmitting and catching) individuals.
/pipe-dream
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
That's where the idea comes from :-)
You know what's great at combating malaria? DDT. Does anyone know of any negative side effects of indoor use of DDT, to the inhabitants or the environment? Does anyone know of a more effective way to prevent malaria?
-Peter
Travel time is instantaneous for all practical purposes. If you think you need the distance to know what to shoot and what not to shoot, that's only half the problem. The real problem is what about the parts of the laser beam that aren't intercepted by the mosquito? I realize lasers do gradually expand, but not enough to avoid zapping the people nearby.
Infuriate left and right
Oh wait...I can't buy one. They don't exist yet. There is just the one prototype and the company that built it doesn't even plan to market it.
Dammit, don't get me all excited about this stuff untill I can buy it!
Note, I am one of those people who attract mosquitoes. You put me at a pond and I get bit and no one else does. I would pay $500 for a personal mosquito zapper, that works, let alone $50.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This lazer device use was banging around in the early 1980's. A couple of grad students from Florida created it. I don't recall how they were able to track the bugs. But they also "tuned" the lazer so that it lasted just long enough to only vaporize the wings. There's just one problem with this device, if the target is between the lazer, and a person's eye.
I'd love them to zap bugs in our code.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
It's a friendly mosquito killing robot here to help you... Until a mosquito lands on your face or near your eyes.
Better living through non-chemistry. I'll bet this can be adapted to target clothes moths and case-making moths, the two species responsible for textile (and other) damage. The things are pernicious; very difficult to remove from a home with an infestation. Perhaps even make the zapper more effective by using it to cover the area where a pheremone trap is located (to draw adults into the kill zone).
While I admit this is very cool and I'll take two; what power is the laser? What keeps this thing from also shooting out a user's eyes while it is doing its job?
As a walking mosquito magnet, let me be the first to say "I'm in. Let's do this thing."
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
This came out of Intellectual Ventures, which Slashdot often derides as a patent troll that brainstorms ideas, patents them, then lives off of the licensing revenue without actually contributing real products to the world or even prototyping their vaguely defined ideas.
This shows that IV is quite capable of producing actual, useful products. Its business model is not limited to patent licensing revenue, which makes it more like, say, IBM, than a typical patent holding company.
Maybe, just maybe, IV is not the evil parasite that many on Slashdot made it out to be. In fact, it seems to be in the business of shooting evil parasites with lasers, which is pretty cool.
I can see it now, in a few years these pests will be on the endagered species list and then we'll have to protect them!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
They'll finally get Binnie L. if they can now just get him to dress as up as a mosquito.
Table-ized A.I.
The original posting has the incorrect name for Nathan Myhrvold. It's Nathan Myhrvold, not Nathan Myhrvol.
Obi-Wan: I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of mosquitos suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Dear Slashdotters,
Can someone explain posts like this to me? I don't quite understand why someone would go through the effort of posting something like this...
Well, why doesn't DARPA fund this then so they could at least gain more knowledge into shooting down things like missiles with fricken laser beams?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
This is awesome. I need to mount one of these on the handle bars of my mountain bike and wire up a firing trigger with the handle. lol
Knowing this can be done, I bet this would be pretty easy to make.
You'd take a pan and tilt servo controlled laser, and put sound sensors around the laser. Move the laser towards the loudest noise, fire when the noise is equal on the sensors. Bingo, dead mosquito. Just like a sun tracker!
Everything else is software, like knowing what frequency to listen to mosquitos on.
Does anyone know:
1. How much laser power do you need to kill a mosquito?
2. What frequency noise do you target?
3. Is it shark-mountable?
The kid who used to pull the wings off of flies just died of an organism reading this.
Table-ized A.I.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Mosquito for Urbanization, Nurturing, Colonization and Husbandry (PETMUNCH) is going to sue these people into oblivion!
Someone better call PETA!
Go back to geometry class. You only need to know the azimuth and altitude of the mosquitoes location. You don't need to know the distance. The laser beam will hit it if aimed properly.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
Well, why doesn't DARPA fund this then so they could at least gain more knowledge into shooting down things like missiles with fricken laser beams?
Because missiles don't buzz at a characteristic frequency?
And because its a bit too late to leave shooting down a missile till its a few meters away?
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
An improvement in both safety and efficiency would be to use two lasers, each about 60% as strong as the currently used single one.
The targeting computer would aim both lasers at the target frying it even faster than now. But, should one of the "canons" miss, or should an unintended target come into one of the beams, the "collateral damage" will be much smaller, because the other laser will not be aimed at the same spot.
I think, the military lasers should use the similar technique — use multiple weak lasers frying the same target from dispersed locations. An unintended object (such as a civilian airplane) flying into any one of the beams will be safe, and taking out the entire installation will be much harder for the enemy. The set can have a cumulative power twice (or more) than is required to destroy one target, while each individual beam is still (relatively) harmless.
When "healthy", such a setup will be able to destroy multiple targets at a time, and the enemy will only be able to reduce its capacity gradually, rather than all at once.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Imagine these lasers hooked up to your wi-fi using sim cards, and through the cloud be able to leverage better targeting systems, And be able to upgrade their firmware to support bigger and stronger targets, spiders and wasps. Until one day the entire network gets taken over by an unwitting team of military personnel. Oh Hang on... AFK. I'll BB...
When I saw the headline, I thought it was a dupe of the earlier article about Directed Energy Weapons but that Mosquito was the name of the type of missile.
First, mosquitoes are only one thing at their level of the food chain. Flies, noseeums, and plenty of other non-biting insects live at the same level.
Second, this is actually better than most current solutions. Mosquito magnets and skeeter deleters and other things attract all manner of insects, not just mosquitoes. Don't get me started on spray permethrin and other insecticides.
Third, mosquito populations are WAY up in my area because bats are being wiped out by that nose fungus infection. I haven't seen a bat in my area in a couple of years, unfortunately, and they used to be common.
Fourth, these units would only work in the immediate vicinity of houses. In my area, that means there's still a few hundred acres behind my house that remain prime mosquito real estate. I only want my yard, they can have the marsh.
And, finally, I don't care. I am, in fact, that self-centered.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Star Wars Mosquito Defense System. Now where are our flying cars?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
So why in the hell are we not nuking them all? why leave the males? So they can go find females that havent yet penetrated the perimeter and reproduce?
I say nuke them all from orbit. And biting black flies too.. The island where I vacation every year in Candada is rife with the buggers. you can see dozens of swarms of skeeters the size of a small house (the swarm not the skeeters) hovering near the tops of the treelined fields at dusk, and the flies along the beach in some areas make it impossible to inhabit without a beekeepers suit (they bite through tshirts). One year I had to run a 1/4 mile off the beach because I was being swarmed by the flies. I could feel them bouncing off the back of my head as I ran... not fun times.
Well, why doesn't DARPA fund this then
Because it already exists and works?
Only if the laser and the targeting sensor are on the same position. Otherwise, the farther you go, the more inaccurate it will be.
"You're implying that a group composed entirely of male mosquitoes will... breed... and bite?"
"No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way."
They use a camera with an optical zoom lens to locate targets in 3D space.
Someones trying out their horrible AI to see if it will pass the turing test? You just failed by the way as you asked why "someone" would write that. :P
letting an idiot know they are an idiot is not a game... it's a responsibility. - by Kristopeit, M. D. (1892582)
His name is Nathan Myhrvold... come on Slashdot... you used to be cool (in an ironic sort of way)
...(Not anything on the research in question)
TED Profile.
Nathan Myhrvold on archeology, animal photography, BBQ
If it does exist then when can I buy one? If it does exist where's an example or pics of the $50 of technology from E-Bay?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I tried zapping mosquitos with a camera flash to see whether a strong pulse of light would disorient them. To my surprise, when the flash was held close to the mosquito ( 1"), the wings would actually be singed! They were very alive but could no longer fly with their crumpled wings. I used a rather powerful off camera flash-- one of the older Canon models at full power. Probably wouldn't work with the small flashes built into cameras.
Flame on about cruelty to animals/insects but I think mosquitos might be one of the few things to garner less sympathy than lawyers.
It's a step in the right direction, but it just doesn't quite beat the competition yet.
Ha, you young Whippersnapper! Back when I was a boy, we used to track 'em in 11 dimensions. 11! And 8 of those dimensions were *dang* small. And if we missed a dimension, our pappy would throw us through a hole in it so we'd have to squeeze back into the outhouse in the 5th dimension. You kids have it sooo EASY!
Now, get off my lawn!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It'd be nice if they could determine the distance and somehow manipulate the cycles of the laser to only burn at that specific distance, so it doesn't endanger other targets in the laser's line of sight (such as my balls).
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Buggy assed bug-laser zapped my neighbor's dog and four year old, then blue screened and left the postman permanently blind in his left eye.
This is my sig.
Seriously, how self-centered are we?
God damnit this is /. how dare you come in here and try and spread your silly idea's about mosquitoes being important blah blah blah. What the hell man? THIS IS A GOD DAMN LASER WEAPON FOR KILLING BUGS! You don't get this? pewpewpew? no? FUCK! {throws chair}
Further, you don't even need some sort of awesome-sauce optics to track and recognize the mosquitos - you just need to listen for them. They're loud little assholes. And listening to their sounds gives you angle, elevation, species and gender, which is all the data you need to decide to shoot one down.
Of course, all this will lead to in the long run is silent ninja mosquitos. We'll burn that bridge when we come to it too.
This is also a solution that is more environmentally friendly than the existings ones such as oiling swamps, deet fogging, or using LP/Natural Gas Traps. Deet is a carcinogen and oiling swamps does damage to other species of wildlife. The system is, admittedly, genius.
... predator drones for mosquitoes! We must bring the war to the scourge of humanity.
Killing mosquitoes is outstanding. In addition this technology might be adaptable to farming to have a mobile robot find and zap insect pests. There would be no need for pesticides. Likewise perhaps the robot could identify pest plant species and zap them. Perhaps organic farming will be cheaper than using pesticides and herbicides.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
I walk by with about 10K of these buggers already sucking me dry? Do I get lit up in a fiery insect apocalypse or what?
Wha? ZZZAP!
Does anyone have a picture of this thing? It would be really interesting to see how it works.
from "Not Necessarily the News":
Fly Wars, from RAID
It'd be nice if they could determine the distance and somehow manipulate the cycles of the laser to only burn at that specific distance
Two slightly lower powered lasers might be able to do this, powered such that two of them need to hit the target to impart enough energy to fry it. Spaced slightly apart on the device they could intersect at the precise point of the mosquito, creating a much smaller 'kill' area instead of a long beam. We're talking about a much more complicated device though.
(such as my balls)
Assuming they are in your pants, they are probably quite safe. It's your eyeballs you should be really worried about.
Who modded this 'Troll'???
Unless the detector is sitting right in line with the laser (or mirror), in which case it would get fried, there is going to be a difference between the angle that the detector determines the target is at and the angle required to shoot at the target from a slightly different starting point. And to determine that angle you need to know how far away it is.
Mosquito's are really tiny... i'm actually amazed they can hit them at all!
Add a discoball in the mix and then you can have a mosquito-free Abba and Bee Gees night every night during the summer.
I speak England very best
Name for a metal band or an emerging trend in entomology? Let's go to our roundtable...
It actually goes both ways, if the mosquito detection is perfectly inline with the laser then you don't need to know distance, if the mosquito detection is offset from the laser you need to know distance in order to correctly compensate for the difference of detecting it at x-y when at z height vs hitting at x-y when at z-10 height.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
... the laser targeting system listens for the precise wingbeat frequency of the female Anopheles Stephensi mosquito and then zaps only those.
Darwin says, in a generation or two, the frequency changes...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Man, if you're the kind of person who says "wow, a laser that shoots down mosquitoes, how cool. Lets dangle my balls in front of it", then you don't deserve to reproduce :)
Every municipality in South Louisiana will pay gorgeous sums to equip every telephone pole. This has to be much more cost effective--not to mention healthier (greener)--than the trucks driving around spraying chemicals in the air and ditches. The annual contracts for mosquito control services are usually well in the millions, even for smaller parishes.
Patent trolls do not make things or have the desire to make things.
IV developed and showed off a working skeeter zapper prototype. Plus they have developed other technologies (Read the wiki on IV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures )
So we have a conflict of definition here... IV actually makes product. Ok, they don't have the scale or facilities to mass produce things to the public. So what? nVidia doesn't make graphics cards, they just licence out their GPUs. ARM doesn't make product, they just licence out their chip designs.
Seems to me IV is a business of RAND rather than physical product.
If it does exist then when can I buy one? If it does exist where's an example or pics of the $50 of technology from E-Bay?
...denialist....
(such as my balls)
Assuming they are in your pants, they are probably quite safe. It's your eyeballs you should be really worried about.
For some reason, this exchange made me think of:
A Dying Tiger—moaned for Drink—
I hunted all the Sand—
I caught the Dripping of a Rock
And bore it in my Hand—
His Mighty Balls—in death were thick—
But searching—I could see
A Vision on the Retina
Of Water—and of me—
'Twas not my blame—who sped too slow—
'Twas not his blame—who died
While I was reaching him—
But 'twas—the fact that He was dead—
(Emily Dickinson)
+1 Dead on!
My kingdom for a mod point!
The problem for DARPA is that it is trying to develop its own mosquitoes - real and mechanical - as weapons. This is a defense strategy that DARPA is likely to buy and suppress.
Seastead this.
When Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft I was wondering what was on his mind? Now I know....Bugs
Sell a model I can buy that kills all female mosquitoes within range. I'll install one on the side of my house tomorrow. The Mosquito Magnet is only marginally effective and those run $250 these days. If this can really be done for $50, sell it for $100 and use the money to lower the cost in malaria areas.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
real and mechanical
so then I take it they have the imaginary ones up and running???
Almost impossible to communicate the power of the tiny midge to people unaccustomed to them, but suffice to say currently there is no real effective defence against them.
Don't forget cockroaches.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
... one funny looking hat you'd be wearing.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I Want one with a dial to select other insects. $200 bucks easy sell
Only if mosquitoes have started moving faster than light all of a sudden.
I don't see the point, you rarely find mosquitoes where you find sharks
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
The beam has to be kept on the mosquito long enough to heat it up. Now, I admit maybe I'm being dumb and missing a detail here, but why wouldn't continually aiming the beam to hold it on the mosquito long enough to torch it be considered a 'dimension'?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
How many generations will it take for the females to become more male-like in appearance?
Then when you start shooting down both sexes, how many more generations for them to start resembling a harmless species?
How many generations for the mosquitos to develop shiny bodies the same color as the laser?
Any other unintended evolutionary consequences? How long?
Oh, and I hope the lasers aren't pointing up into clear air past the target. I'd hate to be a pilot in that case.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Wake me when they actually start selling this product? This seems like something too cool to go to market.
Also, even if they do make a product this time, does that really excuse killing the products of other companies via patents on things they haven't actually built or sold? Then again, if someone robbed hundreds of people, then donated 10% of the proceeds or whatever to a charity named after them, people would defend them, so I suppose that they're only being consistent here if we excuse someone who practices patent trolling to kill their competitors, but who eventually makes a real product.
Sure, it's good to do good things. But putting it forth as some kind of excuse is just lame. Call me when they actually repent of their patent trolling and promise to discontinue it, then we'll see if their reform is real or not. Otherwise, you might as well be selling indulgences.
That's certainly a point, but if you watch the video at the top of the page, the mosquitoes are as good as dead in about 4-5 wing beats. According to this hastily gathered source, mosquito wings beat anywhere from 250 to 1000 Hz. We're talking single digit milliseconds to cook these bugs. Wiki puts their flight speed at around 1-2 km/hr.
If we accept an estimate of 10 ms to cook a bug, and a 2 km/hr flight speed, a mosquito could move as much as 5 mm (or one third of its body length) in the time it takes to zap it.
So yes, tracking could be an issue. But I can't see it being any trouble at all once you've targeted the thing.
Ya ya, I know. But there's often an element of truth and vision in jest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki4JKy4XkC4
Life is not for the lazy.
This would make another 40% of Canada inhabitable.
It's all history, man. -anon
Here in the interior of Alaska we have to plant trees close together in our campgrounds. That keeps the mosquitos with the larger wingspans from getting through. Heck, some of them have their own landing strip at the airport. Our mosquitoes are big -- scary big.
Seriously, how self-centered are we?
Very. Haven't you seen the mosquito's we grow in Canada? They're large enough to pick up small cats, and the occasional dog. There's a reason why anywhere north of Sudbury for those 3 special weeks, you hide in doors. All people will find is your dried withered husk on the ground.
Om, nomnomnom...
... with Google Buzz?
Couldn't help myself, sorry.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
...I was going to say that Monty Python already did a sketch like this. But once I saw how many mosquitos it was capable of downing, I think I want one of those suckers to cover my backyard.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I can die tomorrow knowing my life is now complete
www.boznz.com Simple solutions to complex problems.
>Forgive me if I'm skeptical.
No kidding. In this video, a kid burns a mosquito with a blu-ray laser. The damn thing runs around for 20 seconds before it finally starts to die.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiShG2OxWVc
How come the inventors of this device don't have a video?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html
They don't have a lethal system.
They have a targeting system that works on highly-illuminated mosquitos in a box in front of a reflective screen. The optics track the shadows. You wouldn't be able to sleep in a room with this device because it would have ONE REALLY POWERFUL lightbulb. And very bright walls.
Also, there's nothing in the article about differentiating males from females. Except they say they can. I would assume by size, but they don't actually say, nor do they claim that it works, or that they even have a device or a method for doing so.
Do they run Linux? Can I get a Beowulf cluster of these? :O
The possibilities for awesome here are astounding.
Looking at the video of the system
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNL_Q57Xn28&fmt=35
The system doesn't look very compact, but very cool nonetheless.
“The women are bigger. They beat at a lower frequencies,” Mr. Myhrvold said.
huh-huh huh-huh
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
your missing the main thing here, those kids with those mosquito ringtones, is it male or female??? dont wanna get zapped when your phone rings
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
... when the space mosquitoes comes, and wants to know what happened to their primitive cousins.
Maybe that's too expensive for use in preventing malaria in Africa but I'd buy one in a second!
Am I the only one who finds this statement on the perverse side?