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

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…

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

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.

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.

You can image that preparing a TED talk is no small task. However, a demonstration as ambitious and technical as shooting mosquitoes with lasers proved to be quite a feat.

Between enhancing and cleaning up the software, assembling and mounting all the components, and just making sure everything looked nice and polished, we had a half dozen people occupied for over a month. During the last minute scrabble, some valuable lessons were learned. First, when the shipping company delivers the wrong crate to TED, effectively losing the world’s only Photonic Fence, it helps not to panic. Also, we now know that hotel water glasses are great places to grow extra mosquitoes when you’re running low.

Getting ready for TED was a lot of work, but nevertheless fun and surreal. We are excited about the enthusiastic response following Nathan’s talk, and can’t wait to share our next big idea with you.

Last week, Nathan Myhrvold, founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures presented several of IV’s “malaria projects” to the audience at TED 2010. The Photonic Fence is one piece in a suite of inventions we are working on to help track, understand, detect, treat and eradicate malaria.  It has captured a lot of attention and we have received many questions about how it works. In response, we wanted to share some details on the mechanics of this project.

The following video of 3ric Johanson was shot the night before our TED talk at 3 AM in a hallway of the hotel. The hotel staff were good sports despite the death rays and bug boxes.

The Photonic Fence is not for sale today. IV does not produce products, but ideas. To that end, this prototype is a proof of concept. We are looking to partner with another company or organization to make this idea a reality. So stay tuned.

You can learn more about our other malaria projects here and stay tuned to the lab blog for future updates.

We decided to play around with our phantom V12 highspeed camera while testing subfreezing ballistic carving methodologies.

This poor pumpkin was dropped from a 20′ person lift, after being soaked in liquid NO2 for half an hour.. one very chilly pumpkin.   As the video shows, not just the skin of the pumpkin was frozen.  The entire core of the pumpkin was frozen solid:  around 77 degrees Kelvin (-321 degrees F).
We decided to play around with our Phantom V12 highspeed camera while testing subfreezing ballistic carving methodologies.

The Quarter Shrinker was constructed by Rob Flickenger at Hackerbot Labs.

Quarter Shrinking has three steps.
1. make a coil of wire,
2. stick quarter inside it,
3. discharge an enormous amount of electric current through the coil.

But what does that actually do, other than making a big boom? … (click for more) Read more…