Make 23: Mosquito Blaster

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Mke:

Volume 23

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have a nice gig: I get paid to invent ways to use lasers, optics, and computersto destroy mosquitoes. I work at Intellectual Ventures Lab, which is part ofIntellectual Ventures, founded in 2000 by Microsoft’s former chief technologyofficer, Nathan Myhrvold. At the lab, which is in Bellevue, Wash., we turn ideasinto proof-of-concept inventions, such as a deep-brain surgery tool, a systemto weaken hurricanes, and a super-thermos to transport vaccines.

In 2007, Bill Gates (who co-chairs the Bill & MelindaGates Foundation with his wife and father) asked usto think differently about how to wipe out malaria.Mosquitoes are a big problem in many parts of theworld, and not just because they ruin barbecues.Infected mosquitoes transfer a parasite thatcauses malaria. When you’re infected with malaria,not only do you feel miserable, you may die — par-ticularly if you’re very young. It’s a tragic sicknessthat infects nearly 250 million people every yearand kills close to a million of them, mostly in Africa.If you take mosquitoes out of the equation, peoplewith malaria either get better or die without trans-mitting it, and the disease goes away. At one time,DDT was commonly used to kill mosquitoes, butbecause of its unfortunate environmental impact,its use has become very limited.Today, big money is being invested in a numberof ways to attack malaria, including vaccines anddefenses such as bed nets and wall sprays. How-ever, these aren’t completely effective (drugs aremisused, resulting in drug-resistant malaria para-sites, and bed nets are frequently removed frombeds). In short, the current tools aren’t adequate,and something additional is needed to help.As inventors, we’re constantly discovering howwe can use computers to change the world. So weasked ourselves: could we leverage Moore’s Law tohelp reduce the population of mosquitoes? Morespecically, could we design and build a systemcapable of detecting mosquitoes and blasting themout of the air with lasers?Honestly, when the idea was rst proposed to metwo years ago by physicist Lowell Wood, Myhrvold,and Jordin Kare (a colleague at Intellectual VenturesLab), I was skeptical at such an outlandish notion.

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Others broke out in laughter. But I began thinkingabout it seriously, and I came around to the ideabecause I realized it might actually work. You see,I’m a hacker, and I love to work on both hardwareand software projects. The skills I’ve picked up as ahobbyist could be applied to this project.Five years ago, I opened a hackers’ workshopin Seattle. We have an assortment of tools: an11,000-pound mill, sewing machines, CNC lathes,and MakerBots. Every Saturday we host HackerbotLabs (hackerbotlabs.com), where friends come overto break and/or make things for fun.It was on one of these nights about four years agothat some friends and I built a sentry robot to enterinto a competition at the annual Def Con hackingconference in Las Vegas. In this competition, teamscompete to shoot white targets off shelves. It’s likea shooting gallery for airsoft guns, but instead ofpeople shooting the guns, it’s robots.We hacked our contraption together using some