This makes me feel a lot safer than the ones that actually shoot the mosquitoes down with lasers. It would only take one computer blip that misidentified your pupil as a mosquito to make you really regret purchasing one of those. Merely confusing the mosquitoes with some much weaker infrared degrades far more gracefully.
Lasers are simultaneously more and less dangerous than people think, which is a cute trick. So you walk through some low-intensity infrared beams... so what? It's not going to magically fry you. Energy levels sufficient to scare off mosquitoes are probably barely perceptible to humans in any way. Lasers aren't magically dangerous.
On the other hand, the badly underestimated danger of lasers is their ability to focus retina-damaging amounts of energy into your eye in less time than it takes you to blink, which in this case I mean fully literally and not at all figuratively. Blinking is basically your only defense against lasers that might blind you and if you can't deploy it in time, that means you're defenseless. Anything that can burn a mosquito down in flight is probably enough to burn at least some of your retina, too. I can't believe some of the lasers we sell without permits; if you've got a laser that can pop a balloon from across the yard you are playing with something that can burn out your vision with only a moment's inattention. For the love of all that's holy keep these things away from children. More dangerous than you think.
It's sad, really. I wish people wouldn't freak out to much about the weak laser pointers, but most people have no idea what the wattage is or why it matters, so the weak ones get lumped together in their minds with the dangerous ones.
And I fully agree with you: the general public has no business owning some of those lasers. I wish they would require that you have to prove that you have appropriate safety gear and know how to use it properly or something, because I feel like we're one stupid kid away from overburdensome restrictions that prevent even responsible folks from being able to use lasers without tons of red tape.
I moved from the UK to Canada and have realised that companies really have no clue what potential damage they can expose themselves to. I noticed Bell (phone company) is especially bad for leaving the boxes for their fibre terminals open. No one thinks its a big deal, because nothing happens to them.
One of my friends works for a cable company and occasionally has to patch a fibre connection, and whenever he does he has to run back to head office to pick up the mechanical splice and asked the guy one day "Why don't they let me keep some of these in my truck?" and got told "Because it costs over 500 bucks".
When he told me this all my mind went to was: It costs $500 plus time to repair a fibre bundle and Bell leaves boxes containing 20 or more bundles open.
If you'd have told that to a kid where I grew up, he'd be out there with bolt cutters as soon as it went dark because costing a company $10000 for their own stupidity would be awesome.
So I really don't get why companies leave these bundles unlocked and in plain view. Or why they run peoples cable overhead to a wall anchor on the house. Again, where I grew up you'd only have to piss one of your neighbours off and they'd tell their kid to go out with a branch trimmer and snip your TV.
It really doesn't make sense to me when I've worked on new construction and I see the cable and power companies come in when the house is almost done and use a machine to bury the cables and come up in the garage.
You'd be surprised but bricks don't do an awful lot to a good double-glazed window unit, plus that gets someone trying to find you and the police involved. Spring loaded pellet gun works exceptionally well against tempered glass though, found that one out accidentally.
Also TV cable in the UK isn't strung to your house, its buried. Although most people have either free-to-air in the UK or satellite.
Where I grew up on mischief night we didn't egg peoples houses. We filled water balloons with an egg-flour mix and hurled that, because 10 hours later when people went to clean it off it was impossible. It's literally drying pasta into brick and then trying to wash it off with a garden hose and you don't have any water pressure because the council hasn't had the funding to upgrade the mains, but they're still selling off land for new housing and drop the systems pressure even more.
What's the advantage over insecticide treated nets? I see a few drawbacks: it requires energy to run, surely costs a lot more, and doesn't kill the mosquitos.
On the other end of the wealth spectrum: this lets folks have large windows open without risking annoying bugs flying in (although birds might be more problematic). No window screen or net. Imagine the possibilities: you could install them on your porch to make later summer hours less annoying, and rather than have a bay window, you could just take out a wall.
Or you could use them to help keep poor children from dying of malaria. I'm betting on the porch, though :P
My mind instantly went to the same place. This isn't going to save a life in Africa, it's going to be used to treat the annoyance of the American middle class.
Although the ability to have large windows open with these might see the potential reduction in use of AC units. I know my AC got used a lot later in the year because screens or no screens I found I still got a dozen flies in my house over night if I kept my windows wide open.
Nets and insecticide are high maintenance, insecticide requires routine work to re spray and nets have to be prepared and fiddled with and they dont protect you when you are focusing on a book in your hut.
This tech, assuming it can run for years with a solar panel and battery is 'set and forget'.
I hope they find a large variety of intensities, wavelengths, patterns, etc. and then set all units to slowly vary their parameters in sync with each other over the years, so as bugs get used to old settings, the new ones get them.
Also... sudden gust of wind = mosquito trapped inside my bedroom?
I'm thinking that while this is a noble effort, people in Africa living in huts probably won't be buying one of these and running them on solar power anytime soon.
The poor in Africa won't buy these for full retail price, no. However, they do care about the safety of their children, if for no other reason than that sick kids can't work on the farm.
And it might not be just because of malaria -- mosquitoes ruin a good night's sleep, and a good night's sleep is required for farm work, especially when you're malnourished.
So when offered the opportunity to purchase these for 50 cents, they will do so. And they will have that opportunity because aid agencies will be giving them away like candy if they are effective. Aid agencies have trouble getting things like that into the hands of where they're needed, but grey/black market entrepreneurs help ensure that they do.
As these can be walked through with potentially zero-risk of mosquitoes following you through, then it would be useful in large spaces. IE hospitals, churches, community centres, etc. That mosquitoes can quickly jump from host to host.
Although being able to walk through one means I'd likely have one installed on my front and back door in no time. I'd possibly throw them up in my kitchen doors too as a just in case.
I've been in parts of northern Brazil where malaria is endemic. People there are so poor that they can't even dream of having electricity or clean water. Most are illiterate. Besides, it is useless to protect people from malaria only when they're sleeping; mosquitoes can byte you also when you're awake, right?
Is there anyone seriously dreaming of fighting mosquitoes there with this kind of high-tech equipment?
It doesn't sound like they actually understand why it works. I hear what you are saying, but evolution and mutations have their limit. What if this is just as lethal as ionizing radiation for them?
The system is non-lethal so natural selection wouldn't even come into play (unless these machines became so ubiquitous that mosquitoes start starving to death).
If it was a widespread system, the mosquitos which were immune to it (if any) would have a better food supply, and tend to reproduce more easily, and come to dominate the population.
Natural selection doesn't need a lethal system to come into play.
I have more ideas than I could implement in 10 lifetimes. My first reaction when I see something I thought of come to be is "oh hells yeah, they made my X for me!"
The second is a nice feeling of vindication. "It was a good idea. Look!"
That's what bothers me most about "intellectual property". This "if I can't be the one to build it and profit from it then no one should" notion is just a recipe for nothing ever getting done.
In my case, the only thing that really bothers me about someone else implementing one of my ideas is that I won't have the joy of being involved in its creation. Otherwise, you're completely right -- ideas are cheap, and when one gets "stolen," it's a sign the idea was obvious, and a net benefit to society. The one exception is if an obvious idea gets stolen by a troll.
Can't speak for Cushman, but: Yes. Unless it's an idea I've invested tons of effort into making reality. I've worked on enough startups to know that the idea is usually the easy part.
While this is an awesome development in a preventive approach, the best reactive approach to those purveyors of pestilence remains the mosquito bat[1] - for disease prevention and fun!
