The human race has spent its collective intelligence on a few things: inventing new colours of M&Ms, trying to figure out how Breaking Bad is going to end and figuring out new ways to repel mosquitos. This post concerns a recent advancement in the last of our Great Causes.
Mosquitos are many things. For Americans, they generally amount to nothing more than an annoyance, even if an extreme one. In other parts of the world, they can be deadly. And we don’t have many defenses against the buggers, save for spray-on poison or odorous candles. Even those don’t always work. While mosquitos may not like them, they’ll swarm in if desperate enough.
So the brilliance behind the Kite Patch is that it has nothing to do with repelling mosquitos. Instead, it allegedly makes you completely invisible to them. It’s a tiny chemical-emitting sticker that works as a mosquito invisibility cloak for 48 hours. All you’ve got to do is stick it on your clothes.
It works by inhibiting the carbon dioxide receptors in the mosquitos (the very ones that help the buggers find us humans, so this is metaphorically blinding them), leaving them confused and unable to find us.
It’s still in the testing/refining phase, with 18 days remaining on its Indiegogo campaign, but it’s already surpassed its goal of US$75,000. Not surprising, since being invisible to mosquitos would pretty much be the holy grail of human achievement.
Via Wired
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