TED talk with demo of anti-mosquito laser

This video from the TED conference shows a talk by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft, who now runs a company that invents cool things that are also useful. The whole video is pretty interesting (about 15 minutes long) but if you want to cut to the chase and see mosquitos getting zapped mid-flight by lasers in super-slow motion, skip to the last minute. Enjoy!

The Mysterious Light Gun

One of the major uses for this blog is to try to figure out the answers to questions that get asked while drinking, of which there are many. Here's the first one: How does the light gun from the classic Nintendo game "Duck Hunt" work?

It turns out this is pretty simple. When you pull the trigger, the video game screen goes black for one frame, and then flashes a white square in the location of the target for one frame. Rather than actually shooting anything, the light gun actually just senses if this white square is lined up in your sights. If it is, you hit your target. If not you're just going to have to deal with that dog laughing at you again.

Now off to the pub to think of new questions!