National Geographic
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2022
2:22 · 2.6M views · Feb 17, 2010
A short National Geographic piece showing a laser system that tracks and kills mosquitoes, filmed in slow motion, as part of anti-malaria efforts. It comes from Intellectual Ventures' 2010 work.
HN commenters bring it up as proof that laser mosquito defense is technically feasible, in threads about DIY pest-zapping projects.
3 comments from Hacker News
I want a mosquito-killing turret [1] that you could put in your bedroom and sleep in peace. Turns out one exists [2] (in theory—no commercial product a decade later), but the one I was thinking of would use microphones rather than cameras [3] to detect the bloody suckers. Thing is, I can't find any prior research or even hints that people have considered this approach. (The closest I can find is an app [4] that detects a mosquito from ≤10cm away.) Here are some of my guesses for why it's not been done: A. Maybe it's too difficult to distinguish mosquito buzz/whine from background noise, even when filtering in only known mosquito frequencies (~400Hz [5]). B. Maybe it's too slow to sweep a room with a directional mic that's focused enough to detect mosquito sounds? (Say the turret in one ceiling corner of a 12x12x8ft room.) C. Maybe directional mics don't work well for all sound in their cone and so need to be able to "focus" at different distances (by dynamically changing the parabolic dish's shape), thereby increasing the room sweep time? D. Maybe the parabolic dish needs to be so big that it just looks ridiculous? E. Maybe all of this is possible but the type of microphone is so expensive that it's worth pursuing commercially? I'm curious what you all think about this. It'd be an interesting thing to try making—who hasn't wanted to make a death ray while simultaneously furthering the fight against humanity's deadliest enemy? [6] See also this research paper: Detecting Insect
Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. That will certainly make it work! Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - but will be happy firing the laser at random shadows and what not. And that was in a completely stationary setup and controlled lab conditions, i.e. not at all something resembling a typical poorly lit room! This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons). The "save the world" (mosquito control, diseases, etc.) justification is also par for the course for this type of crappy paper. Anyone who seriously thinks that one could control mosquito problem by shooting them one by one by a laser is delusional. But neural networks and "AI" are being used, so it has to be cutting edge groundbreaking stuff, right? BTW, this nonsense idea has been floated as a publicity stunt a few years ago (including a slow motion video of a laser burning off wing of a mosquito in flight) and it seems that so
Intellectual Ventures made it seem promising enough in 2010, the slow-motion shootdowns are pretty amazing this video Guess there were some obstacles that couldn't be overcome