Has The Mosquito Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzung Its Swan Song? By Cameron Duodu

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzznnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggg!

I awoke with a start. Automatically brought my palm hard to my forehead. “PAH!

I closed the palm and squeezed my fingers all around inside it. Very hard.

Too dark to see anything.
I passed the fingers of my left hand over my right palm. If the mosquito had survived the initial slap, it could have been squashed, mashed, obliterated -- by the coup de grace delivered by the finger action. But alas, the fingers didn't give any feel of the tiny remains of a dead insect plastered on my palm. Nor was there a telltale feel of wet. warm blood.

The mosquito had escaped.
The darned mosquito had escaped!
The *% ! >& mosquito had escaped!
Again!
I had slapped my forehead for nothing.
I was filled with such anger as can only be described with ancient hyperbole. In the Akan language, when someone is so angry that he needs to be teased out of it with brutal honesty, lest he allows it to lead him to do something he would regret later, he would be told: “Go off then and burn the sea!”

The impossibility of that operation was bound to persuade the angry one to accept whatever it was that had made him so angry. His chest, heaving to bursting point, would “fall back into his stomach”. In Akan, “ne bo beto ne yem.”

But right now, I was not about to be placated. I had to try again to get that mosquito. For this was the third time it had woken me up.

I got up and put on the light. I peered at the pillow.

Nothing.
I stretched out and looked at the wall above the bed.

Nothing,
I got off the bed and went to the window to inspect the louvre blades.

There was no sign of the mosquito perching on any of them.

Yet I knew it was in the room. If I made the mistake of going back to bed without getting it, it would come again and just when I was dozing off, it would jerk me awake with that maddening whine: zzzzznnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggggggg!

And I would have to slap myself again.
Why was it endowed by Nature with such quick reflexes that no matter how fast you struck the place on your body where you thought it was, it evaded your blow? Nature intended it to survive, that's why. By feeding on me! Revolting idea.

And then I wondered: how had it got in? Behind the louvre blades -- or in front of them, depending on where you were looking at them from -- the windows were all protected with wire gauze. So were the doors downstairs. Besides, the room had been thoroughly sprayed with insect spray before I went to bed. Yet….zzzzzzzngggggg!

There was nothing for it but to spray the room yet again. How absolutely boring. Perhaps even dangerous -- by all means some of the insecticide would enter my lungs, and hell, toxic spray was toxic spray.

Anyway, I hated the act of spraying. I always tried hard to hold my breath, of course, whilst using the spray. And as soon as I finished, I charged out of the room and banged the door shut, still holding my breath. But when I got into the fresh air and my breath exploded out of my lungs and chest, I could still smell a bit of the insecticide inside my nostrils….

With this history of intense enmity between me and mosquitoes, you can imagine how glad I was to hear that at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference, being held at Long Beach California, in the USA, a man called Nathan Myhrvold has been demonstrating what he calls a “Death Star” laser gun, designed by himself and his crew, to track and shoot mosquitoes in flight.

As Nathan Myhrvold explained, “A child dies every 43 seconds from malaria. Current methods for eradicating the disease [malaria] aren't working very well....

“So until the time comes when malaria can be controlled, 'Intellectual Ventures' [Myhrvold's company] thought it might be a good idea to try to control mosquitoes.”

Myhrvold's team demonstrated the system in Long Beach, California, using a green laser light rather than a real laser (for safety reasons). They let loose mosquitoes in a glass box rigged with a camera on one side of the stage, then pointed the laser device at the box. The laser lights quickly located the mosquitoes in flight.

If you're on the Internet, you can (hopefully!) watch the demo in a video:

http://gadgetblips.dailyradar.com/video/mosquito-killed-by-a-laser/

　
Myhrvold and his team are currently examining how cost-effective it would be to deploy the device in places like Africa.

This is not the first time the 'mosquito zapper' has come into the news. In a March 2009 report datelined Bellevue, Wash., the Wall Street Journal linked the project to the “Star Wars” defence system developed a quarter of a century ago, at the instance of the late President Ronald Reagan, to “knock Soviet missiles from the skies with laser beams.”

Some of the same scientists involved in that project, the paper revealed, are “now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito… In a lab in [a] Seattle suburb, researchers … stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light.

“The insects survived this particular test, which used a non-lethal laser. But if these researchers have their way, the Cold War missile-defence strategy will be reborn as a WMD: Weapon of Mosquito Destruction.”

The Wall Street Journal added “Efforts to eradicate the disease languished for years until recently. Big-money donors like Bill Gates, the United Nations, the U.K. and non-profit organisations such as 'Malaria No More', re-launched the war on malaria, devoting billions of dollars to vaccines, methods of prevention and novel ways to kill mosquitoes.

"You can say we are very lucky -- the right place at the right time," says astrophysicist Szabolcs Márka, a Columbia University specialist in black holes. He has a grant to develop a "mosquito flashlight" designed to knock out the bugs' eye-like sensors.” (Oh, how I wish him success!) “The mosquito laser is the brainchild of Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist who worked with Edward Teller, …. architect of the original plan to use lasers to shield America from the rain of Soviet nuclear arms…

“Its rebirth as a bug killer came, thanks to Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft Corp. executive, who now runs “Intellectual Ventures LLC.”, a company that collects patents and funds inventions. His old boss, Mr. [Bill] Gates, had asked him to explore new ways of combating malaria. At a brainstorming session in 2007, Dr. Wood, the Star Wars architect, suggested using lasers on mosquitoes.”

The scientists killed their first mosquito with a hand-held laser in early 2008. They envision their technology might one day be used to draw “a laser barrier around a house or village” that could kill or blind the bugs. Or, laser-equipped drone aircraft could track bugs by radar, sweeping the sky with death-dealing photons.

Not only can the laser target a mosquito, “it can also tell a male from a female based on wing-beat. That's a crucial distinction, since only females feed on blood and thus transmit disease.”

Left to me, I'd say, “Kill 'em all!” And you know why. Oh my God! -- If the African Union -- or the Ghana Government for that matter -- were enterprising enough, they would immediately buy into such projects, and insist that they be powered by solar energy, so that they can be used in every nook and cranny of our continent/country.

Mass production and purchasing --underwritten, I am sure, by the incredibly prescient Bill Gates -- could ensure that they were sold at a price no higher than that of an aerosol of insect spray.

Watch this space.