NEWS: Mosquito laser gun offers new hope on malaria

One of the biggest challenges to world health is malaria. After visiting Uganda earlier this year, I have since thought of the challeges that face countries where malaria is prevalent. In treating the multiple cases that we saw, there was always the knowledge that another mosquito could start the cycle of sickness all over again. Here is an interesting solution being developed:
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AMERICAN scientists are making a ray gun to kill mosquitoes. Using technology developed under the Star Wars anti-missile programme, the zapper is being built in Seattle where astrophysicists have created a laser that locks onto airborne insects.

Scientists have speculated for years that lasers might be used against mosquitoes, which kill nearly 1m people a year through malaria.

The laser – dubbed a weapon of mosquito destruction (WMD) – has been designed with the help of Lowell Wood, one of the astrophysicists who worked on the original Star Wars plan to shield America from nuclear attack.

“We like to think back then we made some contribution to the ending of the cold war,” Dr Jordin Kare, another astrophysicist, told The Wall Street Journal. “Now we’re just trying to make a dent in a war that’s claimed a lot more lives.” The WMD laser works by detecting the audio frequency created by the beating of mosquito wings. A computer triggers the laser beam, the mosquito’s wings are burnt off and its smoking carcass falls to the ground. The research is backed by Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire.

It is speculated that lasers could shield villages or be fired at swarming insects from patrolling drone aircraft. “You could kill billions of mosquitoes a night,” said one expert.

The anti-mosquito laser was originally introduced by astrophysicist Lowell Wood in the early 1980s, but the idea never took off. More recently, former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold revived the laser idea when Bill Gates asked him to explore new ways of combating malaria.
Now, astrophysicist Jordin Kare from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Wood, Myhrvold, and other experts have developed a handheld laser that can locate individual mosquitoes and kill them one by one. The developers hope that the technology might be used to create a laser barrier around a house or village that could kill or blind the insects. Alternatively, flying drones equipped with anti-mosquito lasers could track the insects with radar and then sweep the sky with the laser.

The researchers are tuning the strength of the laser so that it kills mosquitoes without harming other insects or, especially, people. The system can even distinguish between males and females by the frequency of their wing movements, which may be important since only females spread the parasite.

In experiments, the system could target mosquitoes with a flashlight, and then uses a zoom lens to feed the data to the computer, which fires at the insect. Each time the laser strikes a mosquito, the computer makes a gunshot sound. When the mosquito is hit, it bursts into flame and falls to the ground, and a thin plume of smoke rises.

The anti-mosquito laser is just one of many novel ways to kill the disease-carrying insects, in addition to the conventional strategy of vaccinating humans. Other ideas include devices that disrupt the mosquitoes' senses of sight, smell, and heat; feeding them poisoned blood; infecting them with a genetically altered
bacterium; and creating a malaria-free mutant to overtake the natural mosquitoes.
sources = www.physorg.com/news and www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science