Something like this:
Viral video shows ‘radar air defense system’ claimed to shoot mosquitos with lasers
A laser strong enough to shoot a mosquito down will also be strong enough to cause instant permanent blindness. Would you really want to be in the same room as that thing?
The Gates Foundation has something like this 20 years ago. It used the sounds of wing beats to find and identify gender and species.
It is unclear why nothing came of it. I look it up every few years…
Probably haven’t solved the issue of friendly fire, i.e. potentially blinding users.
It used a microphone of IR laser. Your eye couldn’t see it, nor focus it properly. However, it had just enough power to overheat and damage the mosquito wings.
I believe the issue was with the targeting. It could don’t, but not cheap enough for the mass deployment they intended. Mosquito nets were far more effective, once cost was accounted for.
Doesn’t matter if it’s visible or not- any laser capable of delivering enough energy to kill or otherwise disable a mosquito will harm your eyes.
See the linked article elsewhere in this post, they had to wear safety goggles around it when it was in use.
The Robot I Made That Shines a Laser in Your Eye
(I’m not that guy)
Yes
The real story is how easy it is for bullshit to go viral.
Oh damn I had an idea of doing this just recently. Turned out to be a huge hassle for someone without experience and also dangerous to have a laser that can burn flying mosquitoes ready to potentially burn your eyes out or house down.
Would they be dangerous to mount them on sharks ? asking for a friend.
7 years in evil medical school and all you get are some crummy sea bass…
You need more capital. One
million… billion dollars oughta do it.
Build it in a fire-brick tunnel enclosure, with slow release CO2 , or IR light attractant.
Yeah, I have my doubts. Cool in concept, but getting a radar that is that sensitive and able to track quick movements seems difficult.
It looks like it’s just using an SR04 ultrasonic sensor too which isn’t even that precise.
Doubt anything like that id available for sale. He took the radar from a car, probably needed some serious tweaking to get it to track smaller objects and ignore larger ones.
If you have any military connections, get your hands on a AN/APG-81 from an F-35 and cook all the mosquitos in the room. Get any pets or food out first, of course.
I don’t doubt a laser could fry a mosquito; but could a mosquito actually be seen on radar? I would think LIDAR would be better at detecting such a small thing, and even then…
Astronomers track centimeter-sized rocks up in space. Tracking a mosquito in the same room is not an issue. The rest of the “invention” is the problem.
No they don’t. Our greatest success to date was predicting a 1m wide asteroid a whole 3 hours before it hit.
That’s actually impressive given the challenge at hand. But nobody is tracking centimeter sized objects outside Earths orbit. And the ones they are tracking in orbit are man made trash and not rocks.
You likely can’t. The reason being the patents for the technology are owned by patent trolls who refuse to let them be used.
Source?
Pulled it out of their ass. There aren’t patents for mosquito lasers or what have you. The idea is just moronic. It is a fun engineering challenge but ultimately doesn’t transfer to the real world. You cannot scale it. It is dangerous. It is expensive to keep running / maintained. It has a direct competitor that works 100x better in the form of pesticide / poisons. Also a mosquito net works wonders, is scalable, cheap and efficient.
The technology has existed for well over a decade now.
You cannot scale it. It is dangerous. It is expensive to keep running / maintained.
Your source:
for the demonstration, I had to wear protective goggles since that type of laser is not safe for your eyes; And no one has yet worked out how to make the device cheap enough to be useful in the places it is most needed, places where most people’s mosquito-defense system consists of sleeping under nets every night.
You were saying?
But despite Myhrvold’s enthusiasm, the Photonic Fence hasn’t been all that easy to actually build. It’s taken years of development to figure out how to continuously track and identify a specific type of insect and then dispatch it safely and efficiently. For instance, for the demonstration, I had to wear protective goggles since that type of laser is not safe for your eyes; I was assured that when it’s market-ready, the laser they deploy will not potentially blind human passersby. And no one has yet worked out how to make the device cheap enough to be useful in the places it is most needed, places where most people’s mosquito-defense system consists of sleeping under nets every night.
You mean the patent on an item where they haven’t figured out how to make it work yet without blinding its users? Yeah, it’s definitely patent trolls and not user safety /s
