[TheForge] nukkin' skeeters OTOTOT

[Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer]

When it comes out as a solar powered skeeter zapping baseball cap, folks 
around the world will agree it's worth it, and we'll all Teller.

Bruce Freeman wrote:
> 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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