This is interesting and looks like it was a fun project, but it looks a little complicated to be practical for me personally. I currently just put a screen over a large fan and open a bottle of carbonated water to attract them near the screen. The fan/screen can kill (starve) tens of thousands of them per day and their carcasses can be used in plant fertilizer. The downside of my method I suppose is that the fan will use more power than your laser by quite a bit.
[Edit] Apologies to the parent poster. I did not mean to derail the laser discussion.
That is really clever. I never thought to use an animal to attract the mosquitoes. Not sure what I think about spraying alcohol into the fan, at least my old fan. Maybe he's using 70%.
At a distance, its CO2 (30 feet away). Closer in, its the sweat. Even closer to target, its body heat.
The CO2 itself doesn't need to be warm or sweaty. Just when the mosquito is close to a target, it switches from the general vicinity (CO2) approach to one that will give it a better lock on.
A little more than an hour. Long enough to pull in a swarm. A 2 litter would last longer but I just get the flavored sparkling water. I open it just to the point I can begin to hear a sound.
About 20 feet in front of it. The gasses get pulled into the fan along with the mosquitoes. It works without carbonated drinks too, just slower. And that only helps if there is a swarm of them i.e. near a standing body of water. In standing water you can also use "mosquito donuts" that release a bacterium which is toxic to all species of mosquito larvae. A common brand is called "Mosquito Dunks"
Also hijacking the general mosquito control discussion:
What's wrong with UV light traps? Got one from amazon and the soothing placebo? effect is great.
Great against insects that are attracted by UV light, like mayflies, but not mosquitoes.
Some mayflies may look like mosquitoes, but they don't bite and are mostly harmless. It doesn't mean they are not annoying, especially when there are lots of them, and if that's a problem, UV light traps work great.
I wonder if you could just use something sticky, sort of like fly strips? Fertilizer becomes untenable, but perhaps you could put the energy savings toward a more efficient fertilizer approach?
24 inch drum fan. Box fans might work. The drum fans have higher air flow so I guess its up to the specs of the fan. Try it and see if they stick to the screen.
Have you found a tractor company or robotics company to mount your laser and zap weeds? I've seen a few prototypes on youtube but I have no idea how popular they are yet. If not I hope you find one.
Dear colleagues, I periodically receive questions about the status of my project to neutralize mosquitoes with a laser. I wanted to say that I post all the new information on the open source github - https://github.com/Ildaron/Laser_control
I continue this direction but I do it very slowly. But at the same time, I received very important comments from you.
I've been meaning to write up an 'Ask HN' style question around using something similar to combat a common beekeeping pest called the Small Hive Beetle (SHB).
This is a small (5mm) black beetle that comes into beehives, usually around dusk, and causes massive havoc, can easily wipe out colonies quite quickly.
It arrived in Australia about 15 years ago, but is common almost everywhere else in the world now. There's lots of control mechanisms, but they're all incomplete (traps, nematodes in soil around the hive, mesh layers they can be pushed / fall through but bees can't fit through, etc).
A laser unit sitting in front of a hive, perhaps with an extended landing pad, seems like an excellent use case for an approach like yours.
So, if you're bored, and want to save the (beekpeeing) world ... ? : )
I was doing some reading up on beehives and it looks like there's generally a single entrance to a hive? This could simplify things since if there's a reduced area to guard its possible to control/protect that area to prevent stray lasers.
I discovered a product called the guardian https://guardianbhe.com/ which is mounted by the entrance to a hive and uses red light to obscure that entrance. Wouldn't a similar configuration work, except instead of red light it would incinerate any intruders?
I guess it mainly just comes down to rapid recognition of the beetle. With that kind of info one could hook up any number of deterrents.
Alternatively, if not rapid recognition of the beetle, rapid recognition of bees and just zap anything else.
With a doorway-guard system it could maybe even be done with a tesla-coil-esque thing
Just a thought: I would love to have/start with a device which would track and show me were the mosquito is. This would make it much saver and still very helpful.
"genetically altered mosquitoes to block the activity of a specific olfactory receptor called Ir8a. The result was that female mosquitoes — which are the ones that suck blood — were no longer attracted to lactic acid, an important component of human sweat."
So if we could refine this just a little bit more, we could engineer mosquitos which don't bite humans. And put that into a gene drive.
Still scary as fuck to mess this deeply with nature (note: post-doc work on viral evolution), but this is a less severe change than sterility.
I have some limited background in this though it's not my main area of expertise.
The vast majority of non-bacterial species that are subjected to severe evolutionary pressure go extinct. The main reason this happens is they cannot adapt rapidly enough to respond to evolutionary pressure.
Malaria is a very complex parasitic disease which depends on a whole series of things going right across multiple hosts. If it's disrupted in either the mammal host or the insect host it's unable to reproduce. There's a number of disruptive events that can happen (such as blood cells being the wrong shape, preventing infection from the parasite). There's no variants of malaria that can infect sickle-shaped blood cells even though sickle-cell anemia is very common in malaria regions.
Unlike viruses and bacteria, there's no easy mechanism for a new variant of a parasite to spread its mutation laterally. The replication mechanism for parasites occurs much less frequently and produces much fewer copies than bacteria or viruses do. RNA-based viruses have very high mutation rates in general, due to the defects in RNA replication. The viral life cycle happens anew with every cell infection. Bacteria are even more adaptive - they can actually exchange genetic material even between replications, and of course replicate exponentially without depending on host cells. This is why viruses and especially bacteria can rapidly respond to evolutionary pressure. Other species are not so lucky. For a malaria parasite to respond to evolutionary pressure, it would have to go through its entire multi-host song and dance on every replication cycle. This already massively slows down mutations, as the number of mutations depends on the number of replications and the probability of mistranscription in each replication. But the important thing is that we are already using heavy interventions to prevent the spread of malaria - if we can drop the base rate of spread by some tens of percent and keep those measures, malaria will go extinct. If we remove the index host species (the particular susceptible mosquitoes) it's going to take a very long time for the parasite to successfully infect another species, as the number of replications drops massively and there's no replication reservoir where a new variant can develop. As the individual parasite's lifecycle is short, extinction is much more likely than adaptation.
yes, of course. I do not declare that the need uses a laser for neutralizing mosquitoes. But except mosquitoes, we have many other harmful insects and pests.
There was a study somewhere claiming that it wouldn't. Only a small fraction of mosquito species bite humans, and according to the study, none were particularly important to their ecosystems.
This is always such an astonishing question to me. What happened to "the ecosystems" when we went from millions of humans to billions in the ecological timescale of the blink of an eye?
One mention of "gene" and you attract all the conspiracy theory evolution deniers that suspect the upcoming zombie apocalypse behind the most mundane technology, all the while combusted dinosaurs takes them to their job.
Don't worry, "the ecosystems" are perfectly fine with things appearing and disappearing constantly for the most random reasons.
Couldnt u just use somebody elses patent. Then they can sue. Then they win. Then damages will be calcilated for the patent holder, which should be negligible.
In Australia a patent holder can be forced to assign the rights to manufacture (for renumeration) to someone who wishes to make use of it if the owner is not utlilising the patent
Roughly similar, at least in one iteration. They used a high speed camera and a retroreflective backstop to image everything between the two posts, then wing beat frequency to identify valid targets. After that injure with a laser same as yours. They used to have it running with a visible laser and box of captive mosquitoes in the lobby.
Rather than use a depth map, it might be more robust (though probably a bit more expensive) to just use a beam splitter (dielectric, at the laser wavelength) and have the camera share the bore-sight with the laser.
I have tried killing mosquitoes with laser. It just does not work. Multiple seconds of those powerful green laser ray does no lasting damage to the critter.
“ Carrying an Ultra Laser Umbrella, he walked out of the garage the car humming as it polished, into the dark rain outside in the alley. A cloud of mist covered the man, as his umbrella tracked every raindrop that would make contact with the man and instantly evaporated them before they could get the man wet.”
I feel like this discussion is missing a bit about auditory detection. Maybe that is just my naive conclusion, but mosquitos (at least around here) make a very distinct buzzing sound. Picking that up with some sensitive microphones, isolating the buzz and triangulating in on the mosquito seems possible to me.
Given just how dangerous these lasers are to vision I really hope people to start using this setup … seems way to risky very cool but too risky. Maybe there is another tool besides lasers like a sound wave that could be used to knock the mosquitoes out of the air into a fatal collision with the ground?
absolutely not safe for eyes
in my GitHub the next information
"The main limiting factor in the development of this technology is the danger of the laser may damage the eyes. The laser can enter a blood vessel and clog it, it can get into a blind spot where nerves from all over the eye go to the brain, you can burn out a line of "pixels" And then the damaged retina can begin to flake off, and this is the path to complete and irreversible loss of vision. This is dangerous because a person may not notice at the beginning of damage from a laser hit: there are no pain receptors there, the brain completes objects in damaged areas (remapping of dead pixels), and only when the damaged area becomes large enough person starts to notice that some objects not visible. We can develop additional security systems, such as human detection, audio sensors, etc. But in any case, we are not able to make the installation 100% safe, since even a laser can be reflected and damage the eye of a person who is not in the field of view of the device and at a distant distance. Therefore, this technology should not be used at home. My strong recommendation - don't use the power laser! I recommend making a device that will track an object using a safe laser pointer."
That is (almost*) the same as focusing a laser on the target with a very large lens - a highly divergent beam is only dangerous near the focus. Some laser processing machine developers make their machines eye-safe that way, if you're half a meter from the focus, the remaining radiance is low enough to not be caught by the laser safety norms anymore (there is a very low limit to which radiance is still considered class 1, after that it's not considered a laser according to the norm). But to make a highly divergent beam, you need large aperture optics.
* you'd need to have very good optics and optomechanics on each laser to make the spot small enough - the smaller optics on each smaller laser would make the spot worse than one created with a single large lens, unless the single lasers are actually from a single coherent source
This is awesome. I am not an engineer and am wondering if this tech can be applied to killing field mice. I once read this is a multi billion dollar problem in Australia. Much better to do this than dump poisonous bait everywhere.
I don't think in this application a laser would be practical. To kill a mouse you're going to need a really big laser, that would give you 3rd degree burns if you were exposed. I'm not sure you can buy those things if you're not the military and power consumption might be horrendous too.
Shawn Woods on YouTube has a passion for mouse traps. The most effective one is a bucket with a plank, he can catch about 20 mice a night with just one bucket.
> Just fyi this is not a new idea (not to detract from the creator)
Sorry but this is HN mythological bullshit. It's a well known criticism that Nathan Myhrvold uses his yet to exist 'mosquito laser' to justify his patent trolling. (No comment if it's true)
Meh, it's a known idea because while stoned people talked about it in the 90's. If you have a link to working models though, feel free to post. Idea's are worth nothing. Worse Myhrvold's TED talk was misleading.
So how does it do the killing aspect? I guess I would have previously assumed that you need to heat up/ burn the mosquito to kill them. What wavelength of laser is suitable for killing mosquitos?
For a thermal kill you have to deliver some number of Joules of energy into the target. You can use a lower powered laser over a longer period of time, up to a point. You have roughly 25 milliseconds of thermal confinement time before the mosquito starts to cool off. Longer exposures can work, but the total energy dose needed goes up. Longer exposures also require keeping the laser aimed at the target for a longer time.
Power needed also depends on how closely you can track the target. If you make the spot small enough that the target catches all of it then you minimize power requirements, but that increases the complexity of the optics. If you use a spot size larger than the target then the optical and tracking complexity go down, but you're no longer sending all of your Joules into the target.
I'd like something like this but for houseflies instead of mosquitoes. Although, I suppose a simpler solution would be to install a cat door rather than propping the back door open.
Why not laser control of people? You could setup a dazzler which blinds, say, someone pulling out a gun in a public place. You could couple it with an alarm system to have a limited 'area denial' system?
I'm sure by "dazzler" you mean something causing temporary blindness rather than intentionally afflicting a permanent life-altering injury, but sadly that's not how lasers work.
Are you saying there is no safe exposure limit to a laser? That doesn't sound right. There are already dazzlers available for non lethal defense. You could use a poorly collimated laser to temporarily degrade vision just like any bright light causes temporary pupil constriction. I'm not suggesting causing actual eye damage.
In many jurisdictions in the US, interfering with criminals in any way is itself a crime, even if it’s with cool LTL tech. If you’re fortune enough not to live in one of those places, firearms are a solution that have worked for the last few centuries.
appears to be very far from reality... and there is so many mosquitos around here that I would not want lasers handling them (there are better ways, nowadays)
This is interesting and looks like it was a fun project, but it looks a little complicated to be practical for me personally. I currently just put a screen over a large fan and open a bottle of carbonated water to attract them near the screen. The fan/screen can kill (starve) tens of thousands of them per day and their carcasses can be used in plant fertilizer. The downside of my method I suppose is that the fan will use more power than your laser by quite a bit.
[Edit] Apologies to the parent poster. I did not mean to derail the laser discussion.
More details on this style of setup: https://youtu.be/6BhV-o77RqQ
That is really clever. I never thought to use an animal to attract the mosquitoes. Not sure what I think about spraying alcohol into the fan, at least my old fan. Maybe he's using 70%.
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I wonder how it compares with something like Thermacell ? (haven't used it, but heard good things)
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That isn't a mosquito trap, that's flying insect genocide
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Greenpowerscience is a great channel, was hoping their video would get linked here :D
Interesting method. I knew they were attracted to CO2, but I thought the CO2 had to be warmer & wetter to attract them for some reason.
Mosquitos use different mechanisms depending on the distance to their target.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/28/7068387...
At a distance, its CO2 (30 feet away). Closer in, its the sweat. Even closer to target, its body heat.
The CO2 itself doesn't need to be warm or sweaty. Just when the mosquito is close to a target, it switches from the general vicinity (CO2) approach to one that will give it a better lock on.
(since I can't edit my old post anymore) By chance, zefrank of "True Facts" just realized a video on "True Facts: The Mosquito".
About 10:35 into it it's about the mosquitos that feed on humans... but its zefrank, you're going to watch it all and chuckle at the humor.
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How long does the the bottle of carbonated water last?
Do you just open it and leave it there?
A little more than an hour. Long enough to pull in a swarm. A 2 litter would last longer but I just get the flavored sparkling water. I open it just to the point I can begin to hear a sound.
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Just a bottle behind a screen behind a fan? Or does it blow into the screen?
About 20 feet in front of it. The gasses get pulled into the fan along with the mosquitoes. It works without carbonated drinks too, just slower. And that only helps if there is a swarm of them i.e. near a standing body of water. In standing water you can also use "mosquito donuts" that release a bacterium which is toxic to all species of mosquito larvae. A common brand is called "Mosquito Dunks"
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Also hijacking the general mosquito control discussion: What's wrong with UV light traps? Got one from amazon and the soothing placebo? effect is great.
Tried one. It increased my mosquito bites and killed 1-2 per week. Needless to say I wasn't using it for very long.
Great against insects that are attracted by UV light, like mayflies, but not mosquitoes.
Some mayflies may look like mosquitoes, but they don't bite and are mostly harmless. It doesn't mean they are not annoying, especially when there are lots of them, and if that's a problem, UV light traps work great.
UV doesn't attract mosquitoes
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I think your method would be much better for the indoor use case, but the laser method could clear your whole backyard in theory!
I wonder if you could just use something sticky, sort of like fly strips? Fertilizer becomes untenable, but perhaps you could put the energy savings toward a more efficient fertilizer approach?
Can you elaborate a bit on this? Does it work by the fan blowing them against a screen and they stay stuck on it?
mattjaynes linked a video that explains this better than I did and looks like its a better way to do it.
What kind of fan are you using? Would a box fan work?
24 inch drum fan. Box fans might work. The drum fans have higher air flow so I guess its up to the specs of the fan. Try it and see if they stick to the screen.
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> their carcasses can be used in plant fertilizer
Or fish food.
this device can be used also for weed and insect)
Have you found a tractor company or robotics company to mount your laser and zap weeds? I've seen a few prototypes on youtube but I have no idea how popular they are yet. If not I hope you find one.
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Dear colleagues, I periodically receive questions about the status of my project to neutralize mosquitoes with a laser. I wanted to say that I post all the new information on the open source github - https://github.com/Ildaron/Laser_control
I continue this direction but I do it very slowly. But at the same time, I received very important comments from you.
I've been meaning to write up an 'Ask HN' style question around using something similar to combat a common beekeeping pest called the Small Hive Beetle (SHB).
This is a small (5mm) black beetle that comes into beehives, usually around dusk, and causes massive havoc, can easily wipe out colonies quite quickly.
It arrived in Australia about 15 years ago, but is common almost everywhere else in the world now. There's lots of control mechanisms, but they're all incomplete (traps, nematodes in soil around the hive, mesh layers they can be pushed / fall through but bees can't fit through, etc).
A laser unit sitting in front of a hive, perhaps with an extended landing pad, seems like an excellent use case for an approach like yours.
So, if you're bored, and want to save the (beekpeeing) world ... ? : )
I was doing some reading up on beehives and it looks like there's generally a single entrance to a hive? This could simplify things since if there's a reduced area to guard its possible to control/protect that area to prevent stray lasers.
I discovered a product called the guardian https://guardianbhe.com/ which is mounted by the entrance to a hive and uses red light to obscure that entrance. Wouldn't a similar configuration work, except instead of red light it would incinerate any intruders?
I guess it mainly just comes down to rapid recognition of the beetle. With that kind of info one could hook up any number of deterrents.
Alternatively, if not rapid recognition of the beetle, rapid recognition of bees and just zap anything else.
With a doorway-guard system it could maybe even be done with a tesla-coil-esque thing
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yes, exactly. I considered it. It is very easy to do.
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for Asian Hornet)
>> My strong recommendation - don't use the power laser! I recommend making a device that will track an object using a safe laser pointer.
I always wondered if you can’t use several low power lasers and then cross the beams on the target?
Just a thought: I would love to have/start with a device which would track and show me were the mosquito is. This would make it much saver and still very helpful.
In the long term, I think that many mosquito species will be driven to extinction within the next 30 years.
As gene drive modifications become more accessible, preventing this becomes impossible.
The ones that carry malaria will almost certainly be wiped out.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/07/28/1020932...
Well if one of the above-linked articles on how mosquitos target humans is correct https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/28/7068387...
"genetically altered mosquitoes to block the activity of a specific olfactory receptor called Ir8a. The result was that female mosquitoes — which are the ones that suck blood — were no longer attracted to lactic acid, an important component of human sweat."
So if we could refine this just a little bit more, we could engineer mosquitos which don't bite humans. And put that into a gene drive.
Still scary as fuck to mess this deeply with nature (note: post-doc work on viral evolution), but this is a less severe change than sterility.
"The ones that carry malaria will almost certainly be wiped out."
This is always discussed in terms of the mosquitos and the population(s) of mosquitos.
Should we think, at all, of the population of malaria, globally ?
Is it possible that we could exert this tremendous pressure - an evolutionary chokepoint - on malaria and it escapes in some unexpected manner ?
This is not an area I have any background in so I hope someone can comment on this idea:
If we back an organism like malaria in a corner might heretofore out-competed mutations ascend and suddenly malaria comes at us from a new direction ?
I have some limited background in this though it's not my main area of expertise.
The vast majority of non-bacterial species that are subjected to severe evolutionary pressure go extinct. The main reason this happens is they cannot adapt rapidly enough to respond to evolutionary pressure.
Malaria is a very complex parasitic disease which depends on a whole series of things going right across multiple hosts. If it's disrupted in either the mammal host or the insect host it's unable to reproduce. There's a number of disruptive events that can happen (such as blood cells being the wrong shape, preventing infection from the parasite). There's no variants of malaria that can infect sickle-shaped blood cells even though sickle-cell anemia is very common in malaria regions.
Unlike viruses and bacteria, there's no easy mechanism for a new variant of a parasite to spread its mutation laterally. The replication mechanism for parasites occurs much less frequently and produces much fewer copies than bacteria or viruses do. RNA-based viruses have very high mutation rates in general, due to the defects in RNA replication. The viral life cycle happens anew with every cell infection. Bacteria are even more adaptive - they can actually exchange genetic material even between replications, and of course replicate exponentially without depending on host cells. This is why viruses and especially bacteria can rapidly respond to evolutionary pressure. Other species are not so lucky. For a malaria parasite to respond to evolutionary pressure, it would have to go through its entire multi-host song and dance on every replication cycle. This already massively slows down mutations, as the number of mutations depends on the number of replications and the probability of mistranscription in each replication. But the important thing is that we are already using heavy interventions to prevent the spread of malaria - if we can drop the base rate of spread by some tens of percent and keep those measures, malaria will go extinct. If we remove the index host species (the particular susceptible mosquitoes) it's going to take a very long time for the parasite to successfully infect another species, as the number of replications drops massively and there's no replication reservoir where a new variant can develop. As the individual parasite's lifecycle is short, extinction is much more likely than adaptation.
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yes, of course. I do not declare that the need uses a laser for neutralizing mosquitoes. But except mosquitoes, we have many other harmful insects and pests.
> In the long term, I think that many mosquito species will be driven to extinction within the next 30 years.
I honestly don't know: will this affect the ecosystems? I think (at least) dragonflies eat mosquitoes. No idea how much the depend on them for food.
There was a study somewhere claiming that it wouldn't. Only a small fraction of mosquito species bite humans, and according to the study, none were particularly important to their ecosystems.
This is always such an astonishing question to me. What happened to "the ecosystems" when we went from millions of humans to billions in the ecological timescale of the blink of an eye?
One mention of "gene" and you attract all the conspiracy theory evolution deniers that suspect the upcoming zombie apocalypse behind the most mundane technology, all the while combusted dinosaurs takes them to their job.
Don't worry, "the ecosystems" are perfectly fine with things appearing and disappearing constantly for the most random reasons.
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bats eat mosquitoes, frogs, fish eat larvae..
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I'm sad to say there is a good chance Intellectual Ventures patented similar tech:
https://www.mic.com/articles/180851/the-world-needs-this-sma...
We need regulation to stop patents that aren't actually being used by the filer in a patent. Or if the filer hasn't tried to take it to market.
Couldnt u just use somebody elses patent. Then they can sue. Then they win. Then damages will be calcilated for the patent holder, which should be negligible.
And I still can't buy it for love or money. Screw 'em.
In Australia a patent holder can be forced to assign the rights to manufacture (for renumeration) to someone who wishes to make use of it if the owner is not utlilising the patent
Indeed, discussed on HN (in 2009!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829344
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8705017B2/ (Photonic fence)
I read their paper. But not sure that this is a similar method.
Roughly similar, at least in one iteration. They used a high speed camera and a retroreflective backstop to image everything between the two posts, then wing beat frequency to identify valid targets. After that injure with a laser same as yours. They used to have it running with a visible laser and box of captive mosquitoes in the lobby.
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I think I'd be happy with a 5mW version which merely highlights the insects so I can kill or trap them myself.
How many times have you gone to swat a fly only to have it go out of view?
Or lying awake from a mosquito you can just hear, but not see.
I thought about the laser approach so many times already, incredible that some people actually implemented it.
interesting application
Rather than use a depth map, it might be more robust (though probably a bit more expensive) to just use a beam splitter (dielectric, at the laser wavelength) and have the camera share the bore-sight with the laser.
Ah, someone finally implemented this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSIWpFPkYrk
How does it do against other 'annoying elements in your surroundings'? ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxjTgiEXh7g I try to catch a cockroach with laser pointer Sorry, not good quality of the video
I have tried killing mosquitoes with laser. It just does not work. Multiple seconds of those powerful green laser ray does no lasting damage to the critter.
I want an umbrella that uses lasers to vaporize the raindrops that would fall on me.
Tesla obtained a patent for something similar for use on their windshields: https://electrek.co/2021/09/08/tesla-patent-laser-windshield...
https://anonweblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/untitled-cyberpunk-w...
“ Carrying an Ultra Laser Umbrella, he walked out of the garage the car humming as it polished, into the dark rain outside in the alley. A cloud of mist covered the man, as his umbrella tracked every raindrop that would make contact with the man and instantly evaporated them before they could get the man wet.”
Published 14 years ago
I think the portable fusion reactor you'd need to power it would be a cooler invention.
Those a readily available in the cyberpunk future.
I feel like this discussion is missing a bit about auditory detection. Maybe that is just my naive conclusion, but mosquitos (at least around here) make a very distinct buzzing sound. Picking that up with some sensitive microphones, isolating the buzz and triangulating in on the mosquito seems possible to me.
This has been done, so it is definitely possible
Given just how dangerous these lasers are to vision I really hope people to start using this setup … seems way to risky very cool but too risky. Maybe there is another tool besides lasers like a sound wave that could be used to knock the mosquitoes out of the air into a fatal collision with the ground?
I've thought a lot about mosquitos lately. I almost think our desire to escape them has been a driving factor in our advancement as a species.
I think one of the biggest advantages of moving to the moon or mars is never having to deal with mosquitos or rodents or cockroaches again.
Thoughts on danger to eyes? Ie lasers capable of killing a mosquito may not be eye safe. (?)
absolutely not safe for eyes in my GitHub the next information "The main limiting factor in the development of this technology is the danger of the laser may damage the eyes. The laser can enter a blood vessel and clog it, it can get into a blind spot where nerves from all over the eye go to the brain, you can burn out a line of "pixels" And then the damaged retina can begin to flake off, and this is the path to complete and irreversible loss of vision. This is dangerous because a person may not notice at the beginning of damage from a laser hit: there are no pain receptors there, the brain completes objects in damaged areas (remapping of dead pixels), and only when the damaged area becomes large enough person starts to notice that some objects not visible. We can develop additional security systems, such as human detection, audio sensors, etc. But in any case, we are not able to make the installation 100% safe, since even a laser can be reflected and damage the eye of a person who is not in the field of view of the device and at a distant distance. Therefore, this technology should not be used at home. My strong recommendation - don't use the power laser! I recommend making a device that will track an object using a safe laser pointer."
Could you use a laser at a frequency that the cornea is opaque to?
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Use an array of eye safe lasers that converge on the target.
That is (almost*) the same as focusing a laser on the target with a very large lens - a highly divergent beam is only dangerous near the focus. Some laser processing machine developers make their machines eye-safe that way, if you're half a meter from the focus, the remaining radiance is low enough to not be caught by the laser safety norms anymore (there is a very low limit to which radiance is still considered class 1, after that it's not considered a laser according to the norm). But to make a highly divergent beam, you need large aperture optics.
* you'd need to have very good optics and optomechanics on each laser to make the spot small enough - the smaller optics on each smaller laser would make the spot worse than one created with a single large lens, unless the single lasers are actually from a single coherent source
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it is not easy
Maybe a salt/sand airgun, but it wouldn't be as quiet...
Or carefully targeted squirts/droplets of a pyrethroid. That would add another interesting problem: how to detect and compensate for airflow.
it is not a toy, not for home application
I'd rather have mosquitoes than be blinded. The box fan idea is much more attractive.
I don't want to see any more mosquitoes, one way or another!
This is awesome. I am not an engineer and am wondering if this tech can be applied to killing field mice. I once read this is a multi billion dollar problem in Australia. Much better to do this than dump poisonous bait everywhere.
I don't think in this application a laser would be practical. To kill a mouse you're going to need a really big laser, that would give you 3rd degree burns if you were exposed. I'm not sure you can buy those things if you're not the military and power consumption might be horrendous too.
Shawn Woods on YouTube has a passion for mouse traps. The most effective one is a bucket with a plank, he can catch about 20 mice a night with just one bucket.
Just fyi this is not a new idea (not to detract from the creator)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
of course, not new. But it is the first time when an idea was realized in low-cost segment. And is open-source)
> Just fyi this is not a new idea (not to detract from the creator)
Sorry but this is HN mythological bullshit. It's a well known criticism that Nathan Myhrvold uses his yet to exist 'mosquito laser' to justify his patent trolling. (No comment if it's true)
Meh, it's a known idea because while stoned people talked about it in the 90's. If you have a link to working models though, feel free to post. Idea's are worth nothing. Worse Myhrvold's TED talk was misleading.
Where’s Our Laser-Shooting Mosquito Death Machine? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/laser-shooting-mosqu...
There is also a really slick website for capturing sweet VC bucks: https://photonicsentry.com/
Real. Soon. Now.
So how does it do the killing aspect? I guess I would have previously assumed that you need to heat up/ burn the mosquito to kill them. What wavelength of laser is suitable for killing mosquitos?
There's some available literature on the subject of required laser wavelength/energy for an in-flight thermal mosquito kill: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71824-y.pdf
For a thermal kill you have to deliver some number of Joules of energy into the target. You can use a lower powered laser over a longer period of time, up to a point. You have roughly 25 milliseconds of thermal confinement time before the mosquito starts to cool off. Longer exposures can work, but the total energy dose needed goes up. Longer exposures also require keeping the laser aimed at the target for a longer time.
Power needed also depends on how closely you can track the target. If you make the spot small enough that the target catches all of it then you minimize power requirements, but that increases the complexity of the optics. If you use a spot size larger than the target then the optical and tracking complexity go down, but you're no longer sending all of your Joules into the target.
We chose the laser based on the power since the task is to heat up. Used 1 W, but for burn wing don't need so power.
Using bio systems is also a way. Libella nymphs feed on mosquito larvae, so populating them to local surface waters reduces wild outbreaks
Nathan Myhrvold was going to make a company of mosquito laser
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/laser-shooting-mosqu...
I spent weeks on hospital because of two kids got dengue. so,I don't think this is an overkill solution.
I want one that controls a table tennis bat to intercept rocks headed for my windscreen
All I could think of when seeing this was the Star Wars Mosquito Defense System parody from 2007.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSIWpFPkYrk
I would like to build something this but using a salt gun instead of a laser.
yes, it will be a little easy, because don't need high accuracy, only be dirty
I'd like something like this but for houseflies instead of mosquitoes. Although, I suppose a simpler solution would be to install a cat door rather than propping the back door open.
Iron Dome meets Starwars meets Bug-a-Salt.. It'll be interesting to see how open source extends in this field.
I've often thought a laser like this might be a perfect solution to slugs and snails in vegetable gardens.
Why not laser control of people? You could setup a dazzler which blinds, say, someone pulling out a gun in a public place. You could couple it with an alarm system to have a limited 'area denial' system?
I'm sure by "dazzler" you mean something causing temporary blindness rather than intentionally afflicting a permanent life-altering injury, but sadly that's not how lasers work.
Are you saying there is no safe exposure limit to a laser? That doesn't sound right. There are already dazzlers available for non lethal defense. You could use a poorly collimated laser to temporarily degrade vision just like any bright light causes temporary pupil constriction. I'm not suggesting causing actual eye damage.
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Hey, great idea! We could also expand this to, say, blind anyone trying to say something bad about the president - NLU gets better every day!
sound dangerous
In many jurisdictions in the US, interfering with criminals in any way is itself a crime, even if it’s with cool LTL tech. If you’re fortune enough not to live in one of those places, firearms are a solution that have worked for the last few centuries.
>In many jurisdictions in the US, interfering with criminals in any way is itself a crime
What do you mean by this? In what jurisdictions is it a crime to “interfere” with someone that pulls a gun?
appears to be very far from reality... and there is so many mosquitos around here that I would not want lasers handling them (there are better ways, nowadays)