@rowancheung: 🦟🚫 Tornyol, a San Francisco–based startup founded by two French engineers and backed by Y Combinator, has built a tiny drone that hunts mosquitoes in mid-air. Weighing just 40 grams, it uses sonar, sending out ultrasonic pulses and listening for the echo off an insect's beating wings, to tell a mosquito from a bee before taking it out with its propellers. The goal is serious: mosquitoes kill hundreds of thousands of people a year through malaria alone, most of them young children. But the tech is still early. The only kill shown so far was a moth in a closed room, bigger and slower than the mosquito it's built to catch. The team's bet is that a handful of these drones could one day clear a whole neighborhood, offering a chemical-free way to fight a disease that's plagued humans for centuries.

Rowan Cheung

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Tuesday 28 July 2026 19:38:09 GMT