[TheForge] nukkin' skeeters OTOTOT

Sun Mar 15 07:39:43 EDT 2009

And HOW many millions of our tax dollars did it take to create this fly swatter?

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 3:35 AM, Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer
<artgawk at thegrid.net> wrote:
> Some good may come of "Starwars" after all.  pf
>
> Schade wrote:
>> Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With LasersHumans, Butterflies
>> Remain Unharmed; The 'Star Wars' Connection
>> By ROBERT A. GUTH
>> BELLEVUE, Wash. -- A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists
>> proposed the "Star Wars" defense system to knock Soviet missiles from
>> the skies with laser beams. Some of the same scientists are now aiming
>> their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito.
>>
>> In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats
>> recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds,
>> a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing
>> mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light.
>>
>> The insects survived this particular test, which used a non-lethal
>> laser. But if these researchers have their way, the Cold War missile-
>> defense strategy will be reborn as a WMD: Weapon of Mosquito
>> Destruction.
>>
>> "We'd be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of
>> power," says Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist who once worked at the
>> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the birthplace of some of the
>> deadliest weapons known to man. More recently he worked on the
>> mosquito laser, built from parts bought on eBay.
>>
>> The scientists' actual target is malaria, which is caused by a
>> parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people. Ended in the
>> U.S. decades ago, malaria remains a major global public-health threat,
>> killing about 1 million people annually.
>>
>> Efforts to eradicate the disease languished for years until recently.
>>
>> Big-money donors like Bill Gates, the United Nations, the U.K. and non-
>> profit such as Malaria No More re-launched the war on malaria,
>> devoting billions of dollars to vaccines, methods of prevention and
>> novel ways to kill mosquitoes.
>>
>> "You can say we are very lucky -- the right place at the right time,"
>> says astrophysicist Szabolcs Márka, a Columbia University specialist
>> in black holes. He has a grant to develop a "mosquito flashlight"
>> designed to knock out the bugs' eye-like sensors.
>>
>> Scientists around the world are testing ways of thwarting mosquitoes
>> with microwaves, rancid odors, poisoned blood and other weapons that
>> disrupt the sense of sight, smell and heat mosquitoes use to find
>> their prey.
>>
>> There's work on genetically altering a bacterium to infect and kill a
>> mosquito, and a project to build a malaria-free mosquito genetically
>> enhanced to overtake the natural kind.
>>
>> There's also a researcher in Japan who thinks mosquitoes can be a
>> force for good. He is working on transforming them into "flying
>> syringes" that deliver vaccines with every bite.
>>
>> The mosquito laser is the brainchild of Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist
>> who worked with Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and
>> architect of the original plan to use lasers to shield America from
>> the rain of Soviet nuclear arms.
>>
>> President Ronald Reagan embraced the idea in the 1980s, dubbing it the
>> Strategic Defense Initiative.
>>
>> Senator Edward Kennedy mocked it as "Star Wars." Eventually it became
>> a footnote in history.
>>
>> Its rebirth as a bug killer came thanks to Nathan Myhrvold, a former
>> Microsoft Corp. executive who now runs Intellectual Ventures LLC., a
>> company that collects patents and funds inventions. His old boss, Mr.
>> Gates, had asked him to explore new ways of combating malaria. At a
>> brainstorming session in 2007, Dr. Wood, the Star Wars architect,
>> suggested using lasers on mosquitoes.
>>
>> Soon Dr. Wood, Dr. Kare and another Star Wars scientist teamed with an
>> entomologist with a Ph.D in mosquito behavior and other experts. They
>> killed their first mosquito with a hand-held laser in early 2008.
>>
>> "We like to think back then we made some contribution to the ending of
>> the Cold War" with the Star Wars program, Dr. Kare says. "Now we're
>> just trying to make a dent in a war that's actually gone on a lot
>> longer and claimed a lot more lives."
>>
>> The scientists envision their technology might one day be used to draw
>> a laser barrier around a house or village that could kill or blind the
>> bugs. Or, laser-equipped drone aircraft could track bugs by radar,
>> sweeping the sky with death-dealing photons.
>>
>> They now face one big challenge: deciding how strong to make the
>> weapon. The laser has to be weak enough to not harm humans and smart
>> enough to avoid hitting useful bugs. "You could kill billions of
>> mosquitoes a night, and you could do so without harming butterflies,"
>> says Mr. Myhrvold.
>>
>> Demonstrating the technology recently, Dr. Kare, Mr. Myhrvold and
>> other researchers stood below a small shelf mounted on the wall about
>> 10 feet off the ground. On the shelf were five Maglite flashlights, a
>> zoom lens from a 35mm camera, and the laser itself -- a little black
>> box with an assortment of small lenses and mirrors. On the floor below
>> sat a Dell personal computer that is the laser's brain.
>>
>> The glass box of mosquitoes across the room is an old 10-gallon fish
>> tank. Each time a beam strikes a bug, the computer makes a gunshot
>> sound to signal a direct hit.
>>
>> To locate individual mosquitoes, light from the flashlights hits the
>> tank across the room, creating tiny mosquito silhouettes on reflective
>> material behind it. The zoom lens picks up the shadows and feeds the
>> data to the computer, which controls the laser and fires it at the bug.
>>
>> In a video, researchers showed what happens when they deploy deadly
>> rays.
>>
>> A mosquito hovers into view. Suddenly, it bursts into flame. A thin
>> plume of smoke rises as the mosquito falls. At the bottom of the
>> screen, the carcass smolders.
>>
>> There's ready supply of fresh recruits nearby, where an intern feeds a
>> saucer of goat blood to a colony ofanopheles stephensi, one species of
>> mosquito that transmits malaria.
>>
>> Not only can the laser target a mosquito, it can also tell a male from
>> a female based on wing-beat.
>>
>> That's a crucial distinction, since only females feed on blood and
>> thus transmit disease. Males in the wild eat sugary plant nectar. (In
>> the lab they get raisins.)
>>
>> "If you really were a purist, you could only kill the females, not the
>> males," Mr. Myhrvold says. But since they're mosquitoes, he says,
>> he'll probably "just slay them all."
>>
>> Write to Robert A. Guth at rob.guth at wsj.com
>>
>> Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1
>>
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-- 
Bruce
NJ

The total lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.