The American Star Wars program turned into an antimoscate laser to combat malaria in Africa

At the February Conference TED 2010 (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in Long Beach (USA), American experts demonstrated a radical way to combat the spread of malaria, Membrane.ru reports.

We are talking about an anti -mosquito laser built and successfully tested by Intellectual Ventures (IV) . The idea, stated, lay on the surface since the beginning of the 1980s, when Lowell Wood introduced such a concept. In those years, he was busy in the program "Strategic Defense Defense Initiative), which the press instantly dubbed" Star Wars ".

Now Wood is an employee of the IV, and the idea of ​​using a laser against the Gnus was removed from a long box thanks to Nathan Mirwold, a former technical director of Microsoft and one of the founders of IV.

The first prototypes of the antimoscate laser were too expensive for the assembly and use in third world countries. The latter version is collected from used components with a total value of about 50 dollars purchased at the ebay auction. These are details from old laser printers and digital projectors, game consoles and Blu-ray drives, as well as lenses from digital chambers.

I see the goal

Bill Gates asked to study new ways of combating the malaria of the former Mirold, who has seen enough of the consequences of the malaria epidemic during his charity trips to Mozambique.

Then the creator of Microsoft donated $ 168 million to study methods for the prevention and treatment of this disease, which is one of the main health problems in Africa. On the Black Continent, the sad statistics of deaths from this disease more than a million people are replenished every year.

The development of Wood, brought to mind with the assistance of the famous astrophysicist, engineer and musician Geordin Car from the Liverrand National Laboratory (LLNL), was called Photonic Fens Anti-Mosquito Laser System.

The portable laser system with lightning speed reveals individual mosquitoes, leads the target and destroys both one insect and bundles. The mosquito literally charred, falling into the field of the action of a specially designed microlaiser. A smart system can distinguish between males and females of an insect, destroying only the latter, which tolerate the infection.

The laser is so selective with its effectiveness that, according to the creators, it will be able to kill a countless mosquito (from 50 to 100 per second) during the night without causing harm to other insects

During the presentation, Mirold released several hundred mosquitoes into a glass tank - to pieces to his brainchild.

By the way, with the "star wars" everything is also in order. Recently, recall, the US military was first able to knock down a ballistic missile using air -based laser.

In the creation of laser weapons, the Boeing Corporation, which set the modified plane, the Northrop Grumman corporation, which created the high -power laser, and the Lockheed Martin corporation, which developed a laser beam control and fire, are involved. The laser was placed on a modified Boeing-747-400F aircraft.