A viral mosquito-killing laser device could be coming to the U.S.

27 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by toomuchtodo
(npr.org)

16 Comments

acdha

12 hours ago

This is great to see but also reveals some failures around patents: Intellectual Ventures patented the idea a couple decades ago, did a TED Talk, decided it wasn’t as cost-effective for malaria prevention as bednets and apparently sat on it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123680870885500701

I wanted to buy one back then and still do, and it always seemed short-sighted that they didn’t sell them here for quality of life improvements and use that to get volume and R&D to drive down the cost to use them in public health campaigns. It feels like we lost a lot by not having patents be a “use, license, or lose it” situatio

tdeck

8 hours ago

Isn't Intellectual Ventures basically a patent troll? Everything they have they sit on.

acdha

4 hours ago

I believe the labs unit was setup specifically to change that reputation but it doesn’t appear to have shipped anything substantial.

metalman

4 hours ago

bullshit, somehow , and by any means ,the zapping of mosquitos is an idea older than our species and fits into a whole class of inventions that are waiting for a specific new technical ability to achive and are therefor unpatentable. like the idea of patent trolls convulsing and dieing when exposed to a certain musical tone, deadly to those minds that are tuned to mindless greed.

avian

8 hours ago

> You know, if it hit you in the arm, it's not going to do anything serious.

Yeah, the arm is definitely the part of the human body that is most sensitive to a laser that can make insects go up in a puff of smoke...

Meleagris

11 hours ago

Anyone who is bothered by mosquitos should look into how to build a “bucket of doom”.

Basically you deliberately create the best mosquito breeding habitat in your yard (stagnant water), then spike it with a a bacterial larvicide to kill the larvae at the source.

Since mosquitoes don’t travel long distances, you end up creating a small mosquito free zone around your trap where they were never able to breed. It’s extremely effective

MrDrMcCoy

11 hours ago

It would be much better for all if the mosquito saliva vaccine would just come out already. It causes the immune system to blindly attack everything they carry, and stops nearly all of it. I've read that as a fun side effect it causes mosquito bites to not itch. If the diseases and itching go away, mosquitoes can stick around as food for other critters as far as I'm concerned.

qsera

11 hours ago

Sorry. I don't want immune system hacks. I don't want to throw a monkey wrench to some system that was created by random tweaks over millions of years and cost millions and millions of lost lives to perfect.

Sha1rholder

10 hours ago

Your immune system evolves every minute with everything throwing monkey wrench to it. And it's far from perfect at all.

qsera

10 hours ago

No, the stuff it encountered during its millions of years of evolution is not the "monkey wrench". That is its legitimate input. Those are the things that it evolved with. Those it can handle fine.

And instead I meant all the stuff that is used to elicit a specific response using some incidental behavior. Those were not part of its evolutionary journey. Those it won't be able to handle and would result in un-predictable regression. That is the monkey-wrench throwing.

>And it's far from perfect at all.

A large number of living things on earth live to their entire lifespan. I think in those cases the immune system did a perfect job.

user

12 hours ago

[deleted]

lostlogin

11 hours ago

I’d love this for house flies.

craftkiller

10 hours ago

While I don't have a remedy for house flies, I do have a remedy for fruit flies! Take a cup, fill it with 25% water, 25% monster energy drink original flavor, and leave the other 50% air. Put one small drop of soap in it. Then cover with plastic wrap and poke holes in the plastic wrap the size of pencils.

Fruit flies will be attracted to the monster, fly in expecting to land on the water's surface tension but the soap broke the surface tension so the flies end up drowning. It is surprisingly effective.

Terr_

8 hours ago

> An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fantastic forms of support like that of the daddy-longlegs. But there is a force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a mammal. This is surface tension. [...]

> An insect going for a drink is in as great danger as a man leaning out over a precipice in search of food. If it once falls into the grip of the surface tension of the water—that is to say, gets wet—it is likely to remain so until it drowns. A few insects, such as water-beetles, contrive to be unwettable; the majority keep well away from their drink by means of a long proboscis.

-- On Being The Right Size (1928) by JBS Haldane

... Though I usually quote it for what it says about a horse falling down a mineshaft.