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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'd love to have an auto-aiming laser that detects and fries any nearby mosquito.

The poor critters wouldn't stand a chance.

I would love it too. I spent some time working on one, ten or so years ago. I have forgotten the actual power measurements but I came to the conclusion that a laser powerful enough to kill a mosquito in the ~10 ms my tracking system was able to locate it would be too dangerous to leave running with people around, because even if my "never shoot when there might be a human in the background" algorithm worked perfectly (ha!), even just a stray reflection off a nearby shiny surface would be enough to potentially cause permanent eye damage.

Microcontrollers have improved dramatically since then, so perhaps it would be possible to track mosquito flight instead of just scanning for mosquitos and blasting away whenever one shows up in your crosshairs, but unfortunately we'll never see any commercial applications now that Intellectual Ventures has stuck their toe in. Might be fun to try it again as an open source hack project, though...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

Oddly enough, Intellectual Ventures invented this.

Somebody tell Nathan Myhrvold so he can come in and sue everybody in this thread for reading about his intellectual property.

I've emailed three times, and have called leaving numerous voicemails asking to license this technology. Not once have I ever been called or emailed back.

#PatentTrolls

You emailed? Well, I'm afraid that's just a form of backing up a text file over the internet, so you're already infringing their portfolio.

EDIT: You may want to watch it - leaving a voicemail is a form of podcasting. You're really opening yourself up to liability here.

Dare I say we need a patent super hero, like Captain Patent.

They actually invented something? I thought all they did was sue people.

Does it count as "invented" if they don't bring an actual product to market at all? If anything, that sounds like they anti-invented it - no one else can create one without their permission.

They invented a demo, thus ensuring that nobody will ever be able to produce a product.

The video of the killing is strangely satisfying http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYXPqrXZ1eU

I had to get too tree huggy but mosquitos are a pretty key food source for others. So a fan is great in that it works well and doesn't do too much harm to the food chain.

Actually, there would be little to no downside to eradicating mosquitoes:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

I know, but does that really feel right? Sort of the height of arrogance to me. "Let's take something super prevalent and remove it entirely and I'm sure we'll have a zero sum gain" Maybe it's true though.

What's the purpose of being human, if not to believe your species is morally superior to all others? ;-)

On a serious note, though, I would like to see the human race reach the level of modeling and engineering sophistication to be able to eradicate mosquitoes with no harm to ourselves or the species we depend on. We've basically eradicated numerous microscopic species, and accidentally driven some very large species to extinction; we might as well do it to mosquitoes. Think of how great it would be to eliminate malaria and all other mosquito-borne illnesses.

Species were going extinct long before humans. The biosphere adapted just fine.

Humans aren't magically bad, and what we do isn't automatically terrible for everything. It's possible for us to understand what we're doing.

I've thought about that, but mosquito's are small and hard to detect. You'd need quite a high resolution camera (or realistically two, to compensate for the parallax between the camera and the laser) combined with some serious software to spot mosquitos at the other end of the room.

IV did develop this... http://intellectualventureslab.com/?page_id=563

MAKE did an article on this as well: http://makezine.com/2010/08/30/make-23-how-to-shoot-mosquito...

Yes, but apparently by limiting the detection area to a rectangular segment of a plane (or a photonic fence, as they call it). Don't get me wrong, what they did is pretty cool and I could imagine placing something like that near a window, but it's still less useful than a system that has a 360 degree field of view.

Ultrasound sonar should work, since many animals efficiently detect insects at range that way.

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