Intellectual Ventures Lab

If you still haven’t flipped through the latest issue of Make Magazine, well here it is.  Not the whole thing, just 3ric Johanson’s critically (do I qualify as a critic?) acclaimed article on the Photonic Fence.  Creating a machine that shoots mosquitoes out of the sky with lasers has been no small task.  3ric gives the low down on everything from the preliminary eye-rolling brainstorms, to the three challenges in mosquito assassination, as well as explanations of the hardware, software and methods he is currently using.  Read the entire article below.

Make 23: Mosquito Blaster

Want to learn more about what the Lab is about?  Starting today, and for the next week, Gizmodo will be running a series of stories on Intellectual Ventures and some of the projects that are underway.  The first story about invention gives a brief mention of us. The second, more extensive, piece describes who we are and why we’re here, including a video tour of the facilities. Keep an eye out this week for a lot more coverage from Gizmodo.  We’ll link to the articles below as they are released.

• Eureka: Hello Invention (8.25.10)
• How Intellectual Ventures Wants to Reinvent Invention (8.25.10)
• Why Ideas are Expensive (8.26.10)
• Why We Need More Inventions. Lots More Inventions (8.26.10)
• Why Failure Is an Option at Intellectual Ventures (8.27.10)
• How Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures Would Change the Patent System (8.27.10)

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is a process of suspending tiny tracer particles in the air and illuminating them with a laser sheet plane. The process is used to visualize and measure the movement of fluids. In this case the fluid is air, which is being displaced and agitated by water. Notice the airflow in the wake of falling droplets and along the borders of the subsequent splashes.

Download the HD vesion

Last weekend we held a smallish release party for Make Magazine Issue 23 at Ada’s Technical Books in Seattle.    The cover features none other than the Photonic Fence project, and contains a lovely write up by 3ric Johanson with support from many folks here at the lab & Make Magazine.

Copies of the issue were passed out in exchange for participation in a single-question survey.   Here are the results:

Just tell us what you like to make.

monkey men, circuit bending, tesla coils, amps, lasers, machines of death and destruction, furniture, low cost audio computers for info access to reduce poverty, sewing projects, gardening projects, foody makery, ceramics, a robot that clears large areas of weeds on a steep inline, alternate histories, redesigned clothing, web apps, movies, self-replicating Reprap 3D printers, news, music, friends, smiles and stuff, backyard crucibles, laser light plane touch surface, drones, free enterprise, modeled computers, 3D objects & 3D objects that make 3D objects, metalwork, sustainable design, sculpture, housing, fashion, electronics, embedded CPU projects, trouble, RC aircraft…then crashing them…then re-making them, ATM prototypes, 3ric, anything original or wicked fun, software, cardboard creatures with electric eyes, simulations of societies, AI stuff, coin-shrinkers, fulgurites, wood carvings, wooden things, books, knives, motorcycles, theramin, machines to learn, soldered pysanky, yarn, block prints, costumes, handicrafts, kinetic LED sculptures for “still” photography, lego robots, Craft Robo paper cut art, electronics for scientific computing, clothes, gadgets, clothes with gadgets, FPGA boards, edible sound, magnetic art, new and infeasible ideas, shiny photos, random thing driven by microcontrollers, making people jump (parkour), skin/skeleton/guts electronics, mobile robots, dangerous toys, cupcakes, new and amazing hacking tools, concrete structures,  projBox kit, video games, companies, making people ride bikes to power the entire Seattle Bicycle Music Festival.

The most popular things people like to make according to this very formal and controlled study are robots and trouble.  Needless to say, Make Magazine caters to a hands-on and creative, though unmistakeably diverse, crowd.  Find the latest issue covering our mosquito laser on newsstands everywhere.

For photos from the event: Read more…

Yuck, my brood of dipteran eggs is filthy.  If I don’t do something fast, my unborn larvae may never live to see their third instar.

Fortunately Emma’s here to save the day!  She gives a how-to on cleaning mosquito eggs in order to improve their life expectancy in the insectary.

This was actually a deleted scene from the Insectary video, a previous post on our blog.

We hope you had a great 4th of July weekend! What better way to celebrate than with fireworks and a high-speed camera.

Watch closely in the beginning of the video. You can see smoke from the firecracker rising to create gray bubbles on the water’s surface. Later, during the explosion, notice the little streamers of water which shoot up from where the bubbles were. 3ric Johanson explains that when the explosion’s shock wave hits the smoke bubbles, it causes those bubbles to burst and send up the streamers.

filmed at Hackerbot Labs

Bike-to-Work Day is a national event that began in 1956 and is part of Bike-to-Work Week, which is in turn part of National Bike Month.

This year, Intellectual Ventures had five teams participate in Bike Month.   Here at the lab, 10 bike commuters  enlisted, dubbing ourselves the LABicyclists.   Last Friday morning,  for Bike-to-Work Day, we rounded up a posse in Seattle to tackle the long trek to the Eastside.  The group met on the Burke Gilman trail in front of the University of Washington, hopped buses over the pedestrian-prohibited 520 bridge, then proceeded through the mean Bellevue backstreets.  [Check out our route.]  We took a detour over to the Lincoln campus where Top Pot doughnuts and other tasty treats were being served to all of the company’s cyclists.

LABicyclists flashing their gang signs

For those of us who were unable to attend the TED conference back in February (my couch cushions just couldn’t quite turn up the $6,000 price of admission), we are in luck!   Today, Nathan Myhrvold’s talk was released for the world to see.  Check out our founder highlighting several of our malaria projects, along with cameo appearances by 3ric Johanson and Pablos Holman.

Hey, don’t look so deflated! The warm weather is fast approaching, when the time will be ripe for instigating water fights. Once again we have pulled out the Phantom high-speed camera, this time to examine how liquids behave in a busting water balloon.

We’ve been seeing more and more visitors from the media around here. The most recent journalist to peruse the lab was Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, who was looking for the lowdown on our malaria work. Although the Photonic Fence, a.k.a. the mosquito laser system, has gotten most of the press lately due to Nathan Myhrvold’s TED talk, we have several other malaria projects that are starting to turn heads as well.

The meat of the article follows Karima Nigmatulina, Ph.D. and Philip Eckhoff, Ph.D. (pictured above) and their disease modeling software. A few other projects got shout-outs as well. These include malaria detection tools headed by Michael Hegg, Ph.D. and Ben Wilson Ph.D. (pictured below), the artificial mosquito diet of Barcin Acar Ph.D. and Emma Mullen, and of course 3ric Johanson’s Photonic Fence. Even TerraPower managed to sneak in there.

Dan was a machine, bolting from group to group and scrawling endless notes in the process; we watched him fill up three whole pads of paper! The result is “Short-Circuiting Malaria,” which can be found on Newsweek‘s website and will be in print any day now. We appreciate the coverage and are excited that more of our projects are being recognized.

Check out the Newsweek article here.