Sure, this project is the product of a great humanitarian impulse: wiping out malaria, which claims about a million lives a year. But you can tell the astrophysicists are having a blast with it, too.
Scientists at Indian Institute of Technology and Tokai University have taken the natural features of a mosquito’s mouth, and created a new type of needle that promises pain-free blood sample collection and injections.
Effective over up to an acre of land, this battery-powered garden gadget allows you to commit mass mosquito-cide using a tank of propane. Silent and odourless, the trap emits octenol (something that mozzies find sexy, aspazzarently) to lure the beasties close to the machine. Once there, a vacuum gathers them into the “removable catch basin”, or death pan, as I like to call it, where they are dehydrated, giving you the potential to serve mosquito, midge, black-fly and sand-fly biltong at your barbecues. Cost is US$500, and the mosquito trap will run for up to three weeks on a 9kg propane tank. [Hammacher Schlemmer]
You remember that lousy mosquito noise device generators in the UK that were supposed to drive teens away because only they could hear them? The ones that actually turned out to be audible to just about everybody? They’re coming to the US. People here aren’t too happy about it, with some bans and protests after (and before) some shop owners decided to install them. What do you think? Is this going to work better than calling the cops? [CNN via Boing Boing]
