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Comment by k_sze | Hacker News Reader

I can think of an alternative, not sure whether that would be practical, but it's possibly safer than laser: instead of shooting laser, make a turret that shoots (biodegradable, edible) soap water at the mosquitoes, in the smallest dose necessary to make the mosquito's wings stick. It would require some fluid-aerodynamics and projectile motion calculation, however.

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It would probably be too slow (or you'd need crazy high pressure). The mosquito would have plenty of time tom ove out of the way, especially since it will probably make a sound when shooting the liquid. The advantage of using a laser is that it's basically instant and quiet.

You think a mosquito can dodge a speeding blob of water? It can barely dodge stationary objects. It's basically a homing missle for co2

Depends on the mosquito I would say. I used to train martial art skills by catching mosquitos midflight.

Most are indeed very lethargic, but there are some much more agile variants out there.

I assume you used sticks, karate kid style? :)

Or was it The Revenge of the Nerds?

Sometimes.(but I actually did not watch karate kid) But mostly just with hands. I still do it as a habit ..

not a bad idea… something manually controlled but otherwise similar already exists, the "bug-a-salt" gun. https://www.bugasalt.com

Where are you supposed to use this? Indoors it will corrode your plumbing and outdoors it will kill your plants.

Well that's where the Roomba carrying a tray of margaritas comes in.

If one could be made to shoot fine sand, it could be used outside I bet.

A few grams of sodium chloride is not going to destroy your plumbing or your landscaping. Your plumbing is in daily contact with sodium chloride from the food we eat, the sodium chloride that is in municipal water supplies, and it is a common substance to be found outdoors as well, including soil.

You don’t want to put kilograms of it in your garden, but this device is not consuming anywhere close to that amount of salt. It holds about the quantity of a salt shaker of salt, and can be fired 80 times from that amount.

Use a garden hose, cover the whole area

I think the problem with that would be, that there would be a huge damp patch on the ground where a million mosquitoes would lay their eggs..

Omg, people take these comments seriously ?

On Hacker News? Someone has probably already tried it. Possibly even more than one person — I mean, the linked paper isn’t even the first time I’ve seen research into the idea of anti-mosquito lasers, so anti-mosquito water cannons have probably been tried too.

Guilty as charged.

So???

How well/badly dd it work?

Where's the blog post?

:-)

I didn't think it worthy of a write up. The ML part that made it a bit more interesting was to keep the bees alive but to get the wasps (I'm allergic to wasps), and I couldn't get it to reliably differentiate between the two so it never hit 'production'.

Plain water doesn't work. They just bounce droplets off [0]. My experiments with garden hose and some mosquitoes during watering my garden confirm those findings. Maybe water with soap will work better (due to lower surface tension, droplets will envelop mosquitoes) but I did not try this.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/20733-mosquitoes-survive-raindro...

Even better, a fire hose. It's the only way to be sure.

Since we've got a firehose, might as well light it up first.

This kind of firehose, right?

https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower

problem solved! whew

Salt also works.

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