Directed Energy Weapon Downs Mosquitos 428
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.
Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Add a techno soundtrack... (Score:5, Insightful)
You only have to track two dimensions (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I want ONE! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's friendly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You only have to track two dimensions (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Safety of the device? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Future's so bright... I wear my sunglasses at night.
Sign me up for 10 (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
So much for the food chain (Score:0, Insightful)
Full disclosure: I am not a biologist by any means, so I might be wrong here.
Annoying as they are, mosquitoes are an exceptionally important part of the food chain. To eliminate them would have massive repercussions on the rest of the chain. I heard from a biologist once that the lower you are on the food chain, the more important you are.
Think about it - if you eliminate mosquitoes, things that eat mosquitoes (bats, small spiders, birds, whatever) will have a plentiful food source eliminated.
They will either adapt or die; more likely die as adaptation takes a long time. This means that things that eat THOSE animals will have a plentiful food source eliminated.
And so on.
All because we get annoyed - and yes, malaria is a problem, but let's be a little bit darwinian here - by some tiny flying insects.
Seriously, how self-centered are we?
Oh wait...
Re:Old 1980's Technology, with One Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
3. Mount it above eye level and design it so that the beam cannot be deflected below the horizontal.
Re:Evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice (Score:2, Insightful)
Mosquitoes not fried? That ruins the entire concept for me. I want to kill the little bitches. It's war baby!
Re:Evolution (Score:4, Insightful)
Most likely the evolution will be a breed of them that don't fly near people. Net win for us.
I hope so. It also made me wonder about Poison Ivy. That plant is damned lucky that it is hardy, because I can't think of a worse thing to happen (evolutionarily speaking) than to develop a defense which is exceptionally annoying to a sentient creature with access to landscaping equipment.
I'm sure it worked great as a defense for creatures whose only real option was to 'Avoid that greasy trefoil', but once you add a machete and herbicides into the mix it's amazing how fast a true advantage is turned into a significant disadvantage. I hate that plant so much that I'll cut it off at the roots if I'm just walking through the forest and happen to see it.
Odd considering that other plants (and domesticated animals ancestors) won the genetic lottery simply by having a useful feature which humanity exploited.
Re:Pardon my skepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, why doesn't DARPA fund this then
Because it already exists and works?
Re:Pardon my skepticism (Score:1, Insightful)
Only if the laser and the targeting sensor are on the same position. Otherwise, the farther you go, the more inaccurate it will be.
Re:"Burning Mosquito Footage?" YES. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevermind the fact that the ecosystems which we *rely on to survive* involve many species, in symbiotic relationships... You can call them cuddly or ugly or whatever, but you can NOT call them meaningless. Your existential rant was beautiful up until the part where you were a completely arrogant ass.
The "great cost and labor" actually goes INTO their extinction as we destroy natural habitats in search of food, oil, gold, etc.
Ready for the "big finish"? Hint: this isn't sarcasm...
If there is another mass extinction, it will INCLUDE US.
Re:You only have to track two dimensions (Score:1, Insightful)
I know from experience that a 300mW laser focussed to a 0.003 inch circle will cut cleanly through polyimide film at several meters per second. Polyimide has an optical density somewhat greater than mosquito wings, but is also significantly thicker. I'm guessing the laser they're using is in that power range, however -- probably closer to 100mW than 300, but definitely in the range that even a reflection off a nearby shiny surface would result in immediate eye damage.
One challenge with this is beam spread. It's easy to use a lens to focus almost any laser of reasonable beam quality down fine enough to cut holes in things, if you know the distance of the target, because that's where you put the focal point for the lens. It's a lot harder to build an optics system that can shoot a beam capable of cutting holes at an arbitrary distance, without relying on a (hard-to-make, expensive, hard-to-keep-clean) convex front surface concentrating mirror of exceptional quality. Once I can get to the article, I'm really looking forward to seeing how they managed this.
Re:Evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, whadayya mean, if - we are in the middle of a mass extinction. Whether it includes us or not has not yet been determined. Get back to me in a coupla hundred years (an insanely short timespan for this kind of event, but that's the way it's going).
Re:Nice (Score:2, Insightful)
The trouble with rendering them infertile is that the already-fertile females who are out looking for their meal of blood aren't going to realize they've been stealth-spayed, and are going to bite anyway. Seems wiser to keep the thing set to kill.
Re:Evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
It is certainly possible to detect the reflection of the laser off a nearby object, like say, another mosquito.
That's the way the lidar detector in my car works - if the cops illuminates a car in front of me, I've got a chance of detecting a reflection and slowing down down before he points his laser at my car.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, that's a good point, but the counterpoint is that the spayed female mosquito is going to keep attracting males and may keep those males busy enough that, given the short reproductive lifetimes, they miss the chance at fertilizing the eggs of a fertile female. If you sterilize 90% of the females, that may cause the same effect as if you killed 98% of them (similar to a vaccination herd effect). So, not so good to protect you locally but better in the long run. If you have to place the devices where humans can't be because they could accidentally cause blindness, then they're not very useful for direct protection but more useful for limiting reproduction.
That said, I think somebody else put their finger on how it will fail - selection pressure will change the common beat frequency for the female anopheles mosquito. It's probably related to size, and this will therefore select for a different size of female by letting them survive. Hopefully a production version of this thing can take a firmware upgrade that changes the targeted frequency range.