Shooting mosquitoes with lasers
While this is old news, I don’t think many people have heard of this project. Intellectual Ventures (which is an inventions company) is working on ways to fight malaria. While they have plenty of things going on, the one that I find the coolest is a Sci-fi style laser system which can kill mosquitoes (which are malaria carriers).
Their lab is conducting experiments on identifying mosquitoes flying through the air and then guiding a laser through a computer to hit the mosquito and burn it to oblivion. They are backing up this research with a lot of other information on mosquitoes.
For example, their system differentiates between male and female mosquitoes since the females are the ones that bite humans and transmit malaria. So, the laser only knocks out the female blood suckers.
Malaria claims a lot of lives worldwide every year, and any idea that is working towards solving this problem, no matter how whacky, deserves support. The ultimate goal for this research is to be able to deploy these lasers as a photonic fence which can be used to surround habitations. These fences will be safe for anything other than a female mosquito to pass through.
To read more about the experiments on this topic by Intellectual Ventures, visit the following link: http://intellectualventureslab.com/?tag=malaria.
February 16th, 2010 at 5:09 am
I’ve got to say that does sounds pretty ‘out there’ but you’re absolutely right, anything to combat Malaria is most certainly worth looking into.