I'm surprised blood alone (perhaps heated to body temperature) doesn't attract them.<p>I expect in the next decade or so, sensors and microrobotics will become good and cheap enough that mechanical pest control will outcompete chemical: finding and squashing the bugs with inhuman reach, patience and thoroughness. Of course the tiny exterma-drones may be pretty creepy-looking, themselves.<p>I could picture one implementation being a skirt/kill-zone around a bed, such that any bug that feeds is definitively killed before it can return to nesting/breeding spots. So the customer is still the bait... but they quickly win a war of attrition against any local bug population, unless it's being replenished from elsewhere.
We all but wiped out bedbugs in the 40's and 50's using DDT.<p>I find the short history of DDT fascinating - in two decades, we eliminated Typhus in Europe, went from 2.5 million cases of malaria in Ceylon, Sri Lanka in 1948 to 17 in 1963, we essentially eliminated bed bugs in the US and Canada, wiped most of Dengue fever out out the South Pacific...<p>Then DDT started getting banned after Silent Spring was published and the environmental movement kicked off. Malaria cases went back up to 2.8 million in Sri Lanka in 1969 and a lot of its effects were reversed. It took longer for bed bugs to come back because they don't spread as quickly as their flying counterparts.<p>I'm not a scientist in this field and I don't feel like I can comment on the validity of differing studies about the safety of DDT or its ecological effects. However, I think it's undoubtedly true that in many countries, malaria and dengue and typhus and all sorts of diseases were more of a concern than cancer (and still are). DDT saved millions of lives in the short span of time it was used.<p>To me, this makes the public health questions of the DDT ban incredibly interesting - if you have something that might cause cancer and kill some innocent people but at the same time use it to eliminate disease vectors and probably save more people in the long run, do you keep using it?
I wonder if they use the nanostructure of bean leafs [1] to entrap the bedbugs<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/earth/how-a-leafy-folk-remedy-stopped-bedbugs-in-their-tracks.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/earth/how-a-leafy-...</a>
Relevant HN discussion on the 'itch that nobody can scratch' refered to in a story on Medium: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769925" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769925</a>. That story is about Morgellons, for which <i>some</i> explanations refer to the presence of beg bugs or mites.
No we cannot just simply erase bedbugs from existence. They are essential evolutionary factor of humans. How shall developers scratch their own itch with no bedbugs?