Perspective # 32 – Innovation Reuse - Learning from Defense

Innovation Reuse - Learning from Defense : Lots of learning on how innovations are reused in defense industry. Read this article NASA Inventions You Might Use Every Day. It is seems NASA has a role to play in our smiles too - It even says “If you are happy today with the way your teeth look, you just might want to thank NASA” I guess that is bit too much :)

Similar to NASA our own DRDO is making many smile !The food processing industries have commercialized many innovative technologies developed by DRDO. The hill agriculture technologies of DRDO have contributed to the economic development of people living in high altitude areas like Ladakh. The diagnostic kits developed for bio-defence are useful for the early diagnosis of diseases such as typhoid, malaria, plague, dengue and chikunguniya among the civil population living in rural areas. The water desalination technology of DRDO has been able to provide potable water to a large population living in 40 villages of Rajasthan.

Read WSJ article ‘Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers’ which delves into a interesting research where the technology of the American rocket scientists proposed "Star Wars" defense system originally planned to knock Soviet missiles from the skies with laser beams is now aimed at another airborne threat: the mosquito.!!

The researchers now face one big challenge: deciding how strong to make the weapon. The laser has to be weak enough to not harm humans and smart enough to avoid hitting useful bugs. "You could kill billions of mosquitoes a night, and you could do so without harming butterflies," says Mr. Myhrvold. Not only can the laser target a mosquito, it can also tell a male from a female based on wing-beat. That’s a crucial distinction, since only females feed on blood and thus transmit disease. Males in the wild eat sugary plant nectar. (In the lab they get raisins.)"If you really were a purist, you could only kill the females, not the males," Mr. Myhrvold says. But since they're mosquitoes, he says, he'll probably "just slay them all." :) :)

The WSJ article also says there's a researcher in Japan who thinks mosquitoes can be a 'force for good'. He is working on transforming them into "flying syringes" that deliver vaccines with every bite. !!