h a l f b a k e r yInvented by someone French.
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France is being over-run by an epidemic of bedbugs. There have been videos of them running amok on the Paris Metro. No where and no one is safe from them. If you go to France, your chances of being eaten alive by bedbugs are very high.
One of the places where these voracious nasties like to lie and
wait is along the peripheral seams of hotel matresses. This problem is now solved by the Anti-Bedbug Electro-Seam Zapper Mattress.
Anti-Bedbug Electro-Seam Zapper Mattress is a simple addition to any mattress that consists of a set of wires being sewn along all the existing seams. A harmless (to humans) current of electricity is then pulsed along the wires to zap any bedbugs that may be tempted to take up residence.
Hotels equipped with the new matresses will be able to put up a flashing neon sign with the message: New Anti-Bedbug Electro-Seam Zapper Mattresses In Every Room....
Private Eye
https://www.magazin...EAQYAiABEgJNAfD_BwE
With free bedbug! Who could resist? [xenzag, Oct 25 2023]
https://en.wikipedi...iki/Radioresistance
[hippo, Oct 26 2023]
[link]
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Unconvinced that there is a harmless (to humans) current of electricity that will "zap bedbugs" reliably and efficiently. |
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[+] I've wondered if a similar feature could be used for borders of countertops or cabinets to keep ants and cockroaches abay. |
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I had bed bugs a couple of years back. They're real nightmare fuel. More interestingly, they shed light on the past in ways I'd not considered. Why do hotels have the near-ubiquitous chrome suitcase stand? Bed bugs hate crawling on chrome. Why do all militaries spend so much time on keeping hair short and making beds? Same reason, blankets trailing on floors are a path from bed to bed, wrinkles, creases and seams are where they hide. Winston Churchill said his greatest ever battle was against the european louse. Mind you, that was before the second world war. |
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Ultimately, expensive pest control professionals are a solution. Not the cheap option the landlord went with that looked like Dog the Bounty hunter in a '95 Camry and sprayed an ineffective milky liquid all over the place. No, the expensive people with Apprehend, a fungal parasite that kills them very effectively. Talking with the boss, who could have another career as a Vince Vaughn lookalike, heat works. The downside is that in order to get everything up to an effective temperature, lots of stuff gets overheated. Fabrics shrink, TVs melt, paint cracks, wood warps, whole wardrobes of delicate clothes can be ruined. You make that trade happily however, you'll burn everything you own to get rid of them. |
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With ever increasing population density and international travel, re-adopting hard-won strategies of the past that we un-learned looks like a sensible idea. Beds should be independent pieces of furniture with shiny vertical legs. Hats, coats & bags are removed and stored by the entrance to a house. Clutter should be aggressively minimized. |
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In the past, public buildings and transport like the London underground used to have brass handles and handrails. We progressively modernized, stainless steel and plastic are cheaper and easier to maintain in a way that looks clean. But brass wasn't the only or the cheapest option back THEN so why? Well, the copper in brass is a great surface for bactericidal/virucidal activity, it acts as a catalyst between oxygen and the bug putting them under significant redox stress. Humanity is losing knowledge at a worrying rate. |
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Re. the <link>. That's a space heater and one of those stealth hydroponic grow tents. Well done them. Tumble dryers work just as well. I attempted to get my bedroom to ~114F/48C. Totally impossible. It's difficult to find modern electric heaters dumb enough, i.e. without overheat cut out protection. Even if you bypass that, and trail extension cords through half the house, the room doesn't get hot enough. A damning indictment of the insulation in my house more than anything. |
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//Professionals will tent an entire house.// |
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Not possible in a city row home, and I'm pretty sure they crawled in from next door. |
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The latest edition of Private Eye includes a free bedbug! For those who don't know it, Private Eye is one of the finest publications known to humanity. (link) |
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We fought the bug war about ten years ago: the children slept at their grandparents', and I'm pretty sure hazmat suits were involved, but most of all I remember the books; every book from every bookcase went into black bin bags, and went up on the roof to bake in the summer sun. We used a meat thermometer to check that the internal temperature of the bags was getting high enough. |
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// Not possible in a city row home, and I'm pretty sure they crawled in from next door. // Well, that just means you need to tent the entire row home at once. Sure, it's a logistics challenge getting all the neighbors to work together and getting a tent that big, but not impossible. |
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The evolution of the super bedbug means that it relishes in the extra heat and actually multiplies at an even greater rate. Only hosing down the entire insides of your house with a flame thrower ensures their demise, and even then they just move next door where they wait until you have fully restored the charred shell with new furniture, before moving back in. The bedbugs have won! |
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There are indeed many sci-fi stories which treat evolution as magic. |
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If you don't want to (or can't) heat your house up to kill the bedbugs, then the obvious solution is to subject your entire house to very powerful ionizing radiation to kill of all life therein. A call-out service service for this task would erect a lead screen on one side of your house, and fire high-intensity x-rays (possibly delivered from an x-ray laser) through your house, scanning the beam to cover the whole house. Obviously there is the problem of radioresistance (see link) which is markedly higher in insects than in humans, but as long as you get the radiation intensity and frequency right it should work - e.g. gamma rays might work on insects that x-rays don't work on. It's a good idea to remove all people, pets and houseplants from the house before this operation takes place. |
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//high-intensity x-rays (possibly delivered from an x-ray laser) through your house,// |
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Poor choice of radiation there. The killer app of X-rays is that they pass through soft tissues. Skin, blood, bed bugs, liver kidneys etc. and don't pass through bone... specifically the mineral component of bone. As far as X-rays are concerned, bone and house building materials are very similar, a load of precipitated calcium salts mostly. Then there's metals, which are extremely X-ray resistant. So if your bed bug is behind anything made of brick or metal, say behind a brick wall in a metal bed frame, then it's safe. |
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Microwaves could work. For something the size of a house, you might need to park an F-15 or something in front. |
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//radioresistance (see link) which is markedly higher in insects than in humans// |
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That article is missing a major point, you can see from the table that the lethal dose scales beautifully with the size of the organism. That makes a lot of sense, smaller organism, less to interact with X-rays both in terms of path length and density. Larger organisms tend to have cells the same size as smaller organisms, just more of them requiring many times more divisions. To get that right consistently, you need more sophisticated DNA repair. E.coli fairs poorly, because E.coli comes from a sheltered environment and because having a sophisticated DNA repair system would mean more DNA, more resources, slower replication. |
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