81–90 of 195 posts
The mosquito's don't get up.
I seriously hope, when you try something in Alaska, it helps to, otherwhise you'll have a big problem :P
(PS. We don't have a mosquito problem here, i have seen thee the last month... It was worse last year)
awesome stuff NY TImes. You just wrote an article about something every 4 year old in India (and every other tropical country) is well aware of
4 year olds from India are not the target audience of the New York Times. It's a good thing when something known to one culture is shared with another.
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Wow, this is not something I knew about Alaska. I did a simple google image search for 'Alaska mosquitoes' and that is plain scary.
Not living North enough ;) This is mostly a problem further South and West in Alaska. The higher up you go, the colder it is to the point you don't get that many insects at all.
My experience doesn't completely agree with that.
Everything up to and including the Brooks Range was horrendous for mosquitoes in summer, same over on the Dempster Highway in Canada. Once you get within ~60 miles of the Arctic Ocean the temperature does drop enough to get rid of them, but before that it's a nightmare.
Personally I'd love to have an auto-aiming laser that detects and fries any nearby mosquito. The poor critters wouldn't stand a chance.
I've thought about that, but mosquito's are small and hard to detect. You'd need quite a high resolution camera (or realistically two, to compensate for the parallax between the camera and the laser) combined with some serious software to spot mosquitos at the other end of the room.
Although it isn't common knowledge, the recommended best practice for avoiding ticks and other bugs is soaking your clothes in Permethrin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3sGvZE3rh4 It isn't very well absorbed through the skin so it has an extremely low toxicity when used in this way, as long as you don't breathe it in or let it get on your skin while it's still wet. It's much more effective and less toxic than DEET,…
> Also don't ever mix it with DEET, because the combination is neurotoxic. Holy crap. I must know 100 people who regularly wear Permethrin-treated clothes and then spray on DEET repellent. I had no idea it was dangerous. (FWIW, I avoid them both due to general conservatism when it comes to toxic chemicals, especially when the stakes are low -- i.e., the worst-case is itching and not malaria.)
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Somebody tell Nathan Myhrvold so he can come in and sue everybody in this thread for reading about his intellectual property.
I've emailed three times, and have called leaving numerous voicemails asking to license this technology. Not once have I ever been called or emailed back. #PatentTrolls
EDIT: You may want to watch it - leaving a voicemail is a form of podcasting. You're really opening yourself up to liability here.
I wonder what the impact of completely eliminating mosquitoes from the ecosystem would be. If we could quantify that, and the outcome was enticing, we could release a bunch of genetically modified sterile mosquitoes that would quickly erase whole populations.
Although it isn't common knowledge, the recommended best practice for avoiding ticks and other bugs is soaking your clothes in Permethrin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3sGvZE3rh4 It isn't very well absorbed through the skin so it has an extremely low toxicity when used in this way, as long as you don't breathe it in or let it get on your skin while it's still wet. It's much more effective and less toxic than DEET,…
Do you have a citation for that? It's well known that permethrin is a neurotoxin to fish and cats, but I've never heard of this DEET+permethrin combination.
When I lived in Africa for 2 years we always had a oscillating fan going near our beds. Sometimes I would wake up and hear no fan. I knew the power had gone out and sure enough the mosquitoes would come attack.