It’s comforting to know all the money Reagan spent on Star Wars will do some good. I bet the audience at TED wished they had this when Bill Gates released the mosquitoes recently. I wish I had it growing up in the midwest.

The Star Wars program aimed to shoot down nuclear missiles with lasers. The new program aims at a much smaller target; it seeks to kill mosquitoes en masse with deadly laser pulses. The researchers, led by Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist formerly with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have created a laser that can “tag” mosquitoes with pulses of light from 100 feet away. The current laser is non-lethal, but the next version will be a lethal one — a veritable weapon of mass mosquito destruction (WMMD).

States Kare, “We’d be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of power.”

The mosquito laser was built of parts scrounged on eBay. […] The current implementation uses a Dell computer as the “brains” of the mosquito killer. It uses Maglite flashlights to illuminate mosquitoes, creating silhouettes on a backdrop. A camera spots these silhouettes and blasts the mosquitoes with the laser. Colonies of anopheles stephensi, one species of mosquito that transmits malaria, are cultivated as test victims of the new weapon.

In recent testing, the device scored a number of hits, killing mosquitoes with deadly efficacy, leaving only smoldering carcasses littering the ground. The laser even distinguished, based on wing beat, blood sucking female mosquitoes and relatively innocuous male mosquitoes which feed off of sugary nectar (in the lab they’re fed sweet raisins).