Where’s Our Laser-Shooting Mosquito Death Machine? Where’s Our Laser-Shooting Mosquito Death Machine? Save this article to learn it later. Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section. It’s arduous to think about an upside to mosquitoes. Malaria is maybe one of the most deadly diseases in human historical past. Then there’s yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile, not to mention Zika, a tropical-zone also-ran, until it started to be related to horrific start defects. Scientists suspect that, on balance, mosquitoes don’t contribute much of anything to the ecosystem, other than fending off humans from despoiling rain forests. They aren’t even notably essential to the food regimen of a lot of the predators that eat them. And so, as we attain new heights of mosquito concern, we’ve devised ever-more-superior ways to kill them. Around the yard, there are costly gadgets, like the propane-powered mosquito lure Mosquito Magnet® Patriot Plus ($329.99), which lures the bugs with a plume of carbon dioxide, then vacuums them up to their doom. On a bigger scale, DDT works effectively. Because of almost indiscriminate spraying mid-20th century, the lengthy-lasting poison just about eradicated the Aedes mosquitoes in many parts of the world. But it turned out to have these regrettable Silent Spring unintended effects. There are even experiments in what solely could be called species-cide: Mutant mosquitoes, modified by scientists in various methods to interfere with their reproduction, have already been launched in Brazil, China, Panama, and elsewhere. In mid-July, Google’s sister company Verily Life Sciences began unleashing 20 million sterile male mosquitoes into the Fresno County insect dating pool.