Last year Bill Gates released mosquitoes into the audience for a TED talk on malaria.
This year Nathan Myhrvold tracked a swarm of flying mosquitoes with off-the-shelf consumer electronics technology. Across the full stage, each mosquito was lit up in green.
Nathan: “This is where I put the pinky to the lip. We are going to blast the mosquitoes out of the air with a laser.”
He is clearly joyous when he fries the wings off the little suckers with a femtosecond laser.
Nathan: “This is very satisfying.”
Having studied their wing beat cadence, he can interrogate the species and gender of insect before shooting them out of the air. And since the wing muscles keep flapping during the death spiral, they can also avoid unnecessary zapping on the way down.
Initially, they could be used for ring defenses around malaria clinics (you really don’t want any mosquitoes going in there), but his excitement is around UAVs patrolling the swamps.
P.S. For some reason, he uses the each same Big Scary Laser warning sign as the last femtosecond laser lab I visited.
P.S.S. The canister on the right is another of his inventions, a vaccine dispenser that keeps the vaccines cold for 6 months with no energy input (currently 10-50% of vaccines spoil for lack of proper refrigeration).
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