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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.
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And NOTHING ... I repeat, NOTHING ... is better than burning mosquito footage.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
..and a Roomba to clean up the mess, and you've got a party.
When will it be until mosquitoes evolve energy shields?
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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.
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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
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
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.
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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.
It's a friendly mosquito killing robot here to help you... Until a mosquito lands on your face or near your eyes.
I'm from Maine and I live in the woods near some marshland. If this thing works 1/4 as well as advertised I'd happily pay $200 for one if they wanted to use something similar to the "OLPC" model.
At a manufacturing cost of $50, that's one for me to enjoy my backyard, two for third-world countries fighting malaria, and $50 profit for the manufacturer.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
The Future's so bright... I wear my sunglasses at night.
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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?
Sorry, even at best it can only do 50 to 100 bugs per second. You'd need a lot of them.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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}
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!
... 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...
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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 :)
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.
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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.
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.
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