Why I picture Vincent Price laughing in an old bug zapper commercial?
Sadly, the old ad was pulled from YouTube so his laugh will have to do.
Considering mosquitoes cause so many deaths, this will be a massacre I will approve of.
a WANT! WANT! WANT!
… I must concur. Soon I can have goldfish with lasers attached to their heads! And perhaps one day… I can finally live the dream: Sharks with tiny mosquito shooting lasers attached to their frikken heads!
Cool. This was posted about before some time ago, but at that point I don’t believe it was developed to the point of an actual proof-of-concept device. I’m glad it’s past the “neat idea you’ll never hear from again” stage.
ENugent’s thread on this from 03/16/2009.
I bring up the thread because her husband is one of the people that did this.
Where can I order? Are operators standing by?
I imagine an advanced model incorporated into a hat, that “sanitizes” the airspace within a foot of your head. Just the thing for those summer hikes in northern forests.
"How precise is it? So much so that it can determine gender, since female mosquitoes are bigger and beat their wings at lower frequencies. Only females bite humans, so the system actually leaves male mosquitoes alone. "
Just another assault on the sanctity of marriage if you ask me. I see what they are trying to pull. And just wait until little Timmy is told by his older brother to get up in the tree and make a buzzing sound while flapping his arms.
A hat would be bully! The air would be filled with eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEeeeeeEEEEEeeeeeeeee puff then the smell of burnt blood and carapace and the noise is gone. I wonder if it can be rigged to play the Star Wars Blaster® sound when it fires.
If we had a huge mosquito problem here, I would totally buy a hand held bug zapper that acted like a light saber.
**billfish678 **he’d have nothing to worry about, it only targets females.
I sense a resurrection of the Disco Ball. All patios will have them!
This is well and truly an age of wonder and reason…I can’t WAIT to get one of these for the backyard!
To sit on the Back Patio, not smelling of DEET, drinking a Gin and Tonic, while my MosquitoENDR-3000 shows me it’s impression of Shock and Awe over Baghdad. Good Times, goood times.
Just wait till someone puts their eye out with that thing!
Well, yeah, there is still the all powerful litigious society getting the way to put this into market; however, I think that in this case the good (protecting people from malaria and other diseases (I’m looking at you sleep disease and the Tse Tse fly!)) that will come from the use of this technology will outweigh the few risks.
The TED speech has not been posted yet, but here is a guy from Intellectual Ventures Lab showing more details about the invention.
It works, and it is a combination of a camera, infrared sensor and another laser to id the insect. As I see it, the next step is now to put it in an even smaller package and then mass produce it.
That’s a neat demo, but i’d bet money that they’re not going to be able to target a mosquito across the room anytime soon, which makes it much less useful. This gadget falls into the “wireless power” category - workable at short range, impossible at long distances.
I work in the field of mosquito borne diseases. As a control product, this is beyond ridiculous.
What it actually is is a demonstration of a system that can coordinate instantaneous tracking, identification and shooting of multiple small moving targets. Imagine putting that tracking system on a gun and you’ll see what the implications are. How about integrating it with face recognition software? Then think about tracking and sniping targets in a crowd etc…
Not sure about your say so of not being “able to target a mosquito across the room anytime soon”, the last video posted shows that they can do that. I do agree that at longer distances this will not work, but most people are attacked by mosquitoes when they are in their houses.
My impression is that you have it backwards, the original idea came from the military, and it is still there; this is just a small example of turning a sword into a plowshare.
WANT!!!
Its very possible. But as someone who has been developing novel methods for mosquito control for almost 15 years, my professional opinion is that this ain’t it.
Maybe it could be used in a house, but we already have methods that will work for that and cost many thousands of dollars less, and that don’t have the potential to blind someone. It sure won’t control the mosquitoes that transmit malaria across sub-Saharan Africa.
Don’t get me wrong though, its very cool stuff! just impractical for his particular use.
I call bullshit on this claim.