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Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- bentt 8d agovery cool! Can we get a link to a not terrible website with real information?
- cwillu 8d agoBold of you to assume there is real information behind this.
- seizethecheese 8d agoI have a hard time charitably interpreting this comment. Care to explain?
- dyauspitr 8d agoGenerally, you get a lot of skepticism when you see an article about high schooler or teenager inventing or discovering something. This is not completely invalid because there have been lots of cases in the past where things like this are just fluff pieces and not actually real breakthroughs, more of a feel good thing. Add onto that that she’s a girl and Mexican and you get even more detractors of the shiftier variety.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- duskwuff 8d agoI've seen a number of "child invents thing" news stories where the supposed invention was entirely bogus. For example, one widely circulated story in the late 2000s involved a young student in Nepal inventing a solar cell made out of human hair. Their supposed invention made no technical sense, and no one was able to replicate their results.
- dylan604 7d agoNevermind the number of student projects where the parent or other family member did all of the work and the student is essentially a booth attendant.
- cwillu 8d agoPangram reports 100% ai
- cwillu 8d ago[flagged]
- mjdv 7d agoPangram does not work reliably on single, short sentences.
- cwillu 7d agoConveniently, there was more than a single short sentence to run it on.
- nativeit 5d agoPangram reports “confidence is limited - low word count” https://www.pangram.com/history/94ff59a6-b5f1-40c2-be6e-7dcf73a69b06?ucc=s3R4pdXwHsg https://www.pangram.com/history/94ff59a6-b5f1-40c2-be6e-7dcf...
- seizethecheese 7d agoCan confirm this wasn’t AI generated. (And for what it’s worth, it’s a strange allegation.)
- rcxdude 7d agoThis sounds like a cool science fair project being blown out of proportion by the media.
- lern_too_spel 7d agoWhere "the media" is a small Chilean blog.
- bsoqk 7d ago"Cool clock, Ahmed"
- nomilk 8d ago> Performing security verification > Verify you are human Does anyone else command + w on first sight of a cloudflare screen?
- gonight 8d agoI'll tolerate that but that new QR recaptcha that wants a selfie is 'hell fucking no' from me 100% of the time.
- CamperBob2 8d agoI sure hope humans are in the loop at those companies, reviewing pics that aren't recognized as faces. If I ever see one of those captchas, they'll get to see some things that no human has ever, or should ever, see.
- Barbing 8d agoScrew that https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/googles-camera-based-recaptcha-asks-for-a-hand-scan-to-prove-youre-human https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/googles-camera-ba...
- Calazon 8d agoThere are captchas that demand selfies now? I have never heard of that before and it sounds completely crazy.
- CamperBob2 8d agoNah, I just have my clanker deal with it. It's better at those stupid puzzles than I am.
- ssl-3 8d ago> Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had. ...meanwhile, some folks at George Mason University were doing this back in 2015[1]: > The fire extinguisher uses low-frequency sound waves to douse a blaze. Engineering seniors Viet Tran and Seth Robertson now hold a preliminary patent application for their potentially revolutionizing device. []: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10569115B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10569115B2/en [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPVQMZ4ikvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPVQMZ4ikvM
- Anduia 8d agoUS military showed a version in 2012 [1], and there is a DARPA report[2] That said, it's a solid student project. I'm sure she'll do well at university. [1]: https://www.ifsecglobal.com/uncategorized/soundwaves-a-new-principle-in-fire-suppression/ https://www.ifsecglobal.com/uncategorized/soundwaves-a-new-p... [2]: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/DARPA/13-F-1078_REPORT_FLAME_SUPPRESSION_ACOUSTIC_SUPPRESSION.pdf https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
- joeypickles 8d agoIt’s frustrating that the site wrote that. I’d wager a taco that she never made that claim.
- Terr_ 8d agoPerhaps a shorter and less formal version of this science news cycle: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
- joeypickles 7d agoVery true, but I don’t see it as a cycle like that comic says. It is more of an unhealthy digestive tract.
- frickinLasers 8d agoI wonder if she got the idea from https://www.sonicfiretech.com/ https://www.sonicfiretech.com/
- ozozozd 6d agoThis exists and we still put out fire with spraying water? Why do we live in stone age and work on slop machines instead?
- cactusplant7374 8d ago> Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had. Hate to be a downer, but this has been done before. https://acoustics.org/pressroom/httpdocs/150th/Plaks.html https://acoustics.org/pressroom/httpdocs/150th/Plaks.html
- cwillu 8d ago[flagged]
- nilslindemann 8d agoWell, a search for "youtube acoustic fire extinguisher" indicates it has already been invented a few times by people all over the world. The most interesting video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvnCQg4w4o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvnCQg4w4o8
- fsckboy 8d agoI'll bet that high school girl's science was better than what's in that youtube (it doesn't set a very high bar)
- pestatije 8d agothat comparison says more about you than about how high school girls science is
- pinkmuffinere 8d agoThis channel (The Action Lab) is great, it sets an amazingly high standard for clarity of explanation, and for practical combination of experiments and theory, all while being appealing to a broad audience. Most educators would be extremely proud to produce work that's accurate to the standards of a university professor, while remaining appealing to middle-schoolers. I can't imagine what more you want from the content.
- fsckboy 7d agohe called oxygen the fuel for the fire. the discovery of oxygen was an enormous milestone in the history of science, chemistry, and biology precisely because it's not the fuel for the fire. before that, people knew about fuel, they didn't know about oxygen. also, he doesn't understand how a bass reflex speaker works. unlike what he said, the port actually decreases the efficiency of the speaker by letting the negative bass note sine waves cancel out the positive sine waves from the front of the speaker, but this is done to tone down the "boominess" of the speaker at its resonant frequency, thus making the speaker more "neutral" sounding, and it's achieved by having the dimensions of the box and the port finely tuned to work most "efficiently" at the resonant frequency. but in any case, what he says about the "bulk" movement of air (he should probably call it net, i mean all air is bulk by nature) there is no way that the speaker pumping air in and out of the cavity could turn into net movement in one direction. (the smoke ring blower is slowly charged up in one direction, then released in something like an impulse function but loudspeakers don't have that nature) if what he is seeing with his fan-probe is correct, that should have impressed him more and distracted him into studying what exactly was going on (ex: the air coming out was directionally focused from the cone? and sucking back in was amorphous and somehow not detected by his device?) because it is looking for explanation.
- mulanroo 8d agoThe reason this keeps getting reinvented is that the physics only half works. Sound disrupts the flame's boundary layer and separates it from the fuel, but it removes almost no heat. The fuel stays above its ignition temperature, so anything hot nearby relights it the second the speaker stops. DARPA demoed this in 2012 and it stalled there. Impressive on a small liquid fuel fire in a lab, very hard to scale to anything you'd actually want to put out.
- rkagerer 8d agoI wonder if one could use a thermal camera (or some other, high speed sensor) and some kind of feedback loop to squelch it and keep it disrupted until it cools. Or conversely, manipulate the flame for more complete combustion (in industrial processes). But granted, I have trouble seeing this work on a large scale without much more sophisticated sonic wave tech.
- pmontra 8d agoYes, I kind of discovered that in a dream, in which I extinguished a fire by teleporting away oxygen. It worked, until I stopped teleporting. The oxygen came back and the fire started again. When I eventually woke up I thought about it and I told to myself that I should have chilled the place, not that it matters in real life. I was also proud of my subconscious' understanding of physics.
- katatue 8d agoSame application spectrum as CO2 fire extinguishers I'd imagine (which we use for expensive lab hardware that we don't want to get damaged by water, foam, ..., but which are utterly useless for anything more substantial becuase it just reignites).
- bawolff 8d agoout of curiosity, would something like this hurt a human? I assume the sound waves must be pretty powerful to put out a fire.
- _carbyau_ 8d agoSeems like a standing wave thing to halt airflow rather than "overpower with Bill & Ted's Awesomeness!". Depending on what they have going, it might be loud, might not.
- zdragnar 8d agoThere's plenty of links in Dublin comments for other instances of the tech being developed at least partially, and at least one for in-home fire suppression. Given that last one, I'm thinking it operates on the basis of resonance rather than amplitude to disrupt combustion.
- nomel 8d agoIt's a standard subwoofer speaker/driver put in a ported enclosure, running at 30Hz, creating a particularly "fast punch" sub. The design of this would have all the same goals of a normal subwoofer: moving a bunch of air at low frequency. You can buy this sort of design to listen to music in your car [1]. It all runs on 12 volts because it's standard car audio equipment. Subwoofers can definitely harm human ears, but definitely not human flesh. Just don't put your ear up to it. [1] https://cadencesound.com/product/tube12vp/?srsltid=AfmBOoqdEtj79iNuieJuX6waNbnX0ncRrTNULuPTCg0A9xZslSiUiAz8 https://cadencesound.com/product/tube12vp/?srsltid=AfmBOoqdE...
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- kevin_nisbet 8d agoNot exactly acoustic but reminds me of a high school science project we had one year, something along the lines of put out a candle with a contraption. My partner and I rigged up a balloon to be popped by the candle, and the balloon pop blows out the candle. Probably not an original idea, but I don't think any other group in the class tried a similar approach. Worked like a charm.
- rtkwe 7d agoBasically a small scale version of using explosives to interrupt and extinguish oil well fires [0]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/physicsgifs/comments/5omaxc/oil_well_fire_extinguished_by_tnt_kuwait_1991/ https://www.reddit.com/r/physicsgifs/comments/5omaxc/oil_wel...
- Animats 8d agoThis seems to be a known technology but hasn't made it as a product.[1] It might have potential for very specific types of extinguishing, such as grills and grain silos, where the distance from extinguisher to trouble spot is fixed. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/8/4/129 https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/8/4/129
- nacozarina 7d agoThe real barrier is that Big Extinguisher’s whole revenue model is based on bottle expiration dates.
- spottedmarley 8d agoOooh.. from the title I thought this was about an extinguisher for when your guitar catches fire. Makes more sense now
- rootedbox 8d agoAt other frequencies, sound can actually intensify flames, depending on the surrounding environment. Standing waves and the frequency of the sound (FM) are likely factors in this phenomenon. However, it’s not advisable to use sound as a method for extinguishing fires.
- dosisking 8d agoInstead of FM, maybe they can just use an AY-3-8910?
- biffert8 8d ago[flagged]
- copper-float 8d agoWhy does it matter that she's Mexican?
- ajkjk 8d agoStereotyped as less of a STEM country, probably accurately, so it seems newsworthy plus gives people hope and optimism to hear about cool inventions from there.
- bigstrat2003 8d agoOr, you know... people like to know more about the bright kid who came up with a cool idea. Not everything is racism.
- ajkjk 8d agoeither one, yeah
- fkgkglgkkh 8d ago[flagged]
- lern_too_spel 8d agoBecause it's a Chilean blog about feel good stories in Latin America, just like it says on the tin.
- yesitcan 8d ago[flagged]
- MathMonkeyMan 8d agoWhen an oil well goes off, high explosives can be used to extinguish it. Maybe this is the same principle.
- johnohara 8d agoPaul Neal "Red" Adair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair
- pfdietz 7d agoMore modern techniques are less violent. I understand one heavily used in Kuwait was to place a ~10 meter hollow pipe above the blown out well so the flame could be displaced from the well head, then injecting water or nitrogen at the base of the pipe to put out the fire.
- _davide_ 7d agoBuoooo, boooring; I wanna see explosions
- adolph 7d agoTo clarify, Red Adair and company did take part in the remediation effort in post Gulf War Kuwait: Many consider his crowning achievement to be his central role in containing the Kuwaiti oil field fires of 1991 that threatened planetary environmental consequences as well as incalculable lost revenues for oil producers. Following a scorched earth retreat policy, Saddam Hussein's defeated army set ablaze more than 700 of Kuwait's 1,000 oil wells. Adair was among the first responders, and his team squelched fires at 117 of the nation's most productive wells. https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/red-adair-to-the-rescue https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/red-adair-to-t...
- CR1337 8d ago..has been around for a long time. DARPA worked on it 10+ years ago.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- Sabinus 8d agoI struggle to understand why this article is interesting or upvoted.
- flippingheck 7d agoThe device is acoustic. Think of it as a babel fish for telling fire to stop.
- itintheory 7d agoSure, but this "invention" isn't new. It seems to make the internet rounds every few months. Here's one from 11 years ago that looks almost identical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPVQMZ4ikvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPVQMZ4ikvM - I wonder how their "preliminary patent application" went...
- z2 7d agoGranted, as another post noted: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10569115B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10569115B2/en
- dfee 8d agowhen i was in the 5th grade (give or take a couple years), there was an innovation project where we were to bring in and present to the class an invention. i remember a girl inventing what i now know to be a "flexible weighted dip tube" – think of it as a shampoo bottle that you can pump upside down – and was amazed. like this submission, the flexible straw wasn't really invented by the student. at best it was independently discovered, but this patent was from at least twenty five years before: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3547296A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US3547296A/en to that end, i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are – especially in the time of the internet when prior art is so easily discovered. or, did i miss the point?
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- nomel 8d agoI suspect she was pushed along by adults, with particular motives, more than anything. Regardless, nobody involved is honest, and I suspect the honest ones were told the be quiet.
- nomel 7d agoThey're either dishonest, or they're too stupid to know how to use the internet. You pick. Seriously, what's the alternative here? The only exception would be an honest person too afraid to speak up, to correct the dishonest/incompetent people, and I could agree with that. I don't blame the kid though. Looks like they did a great job on it!
- ninalanyon 8d ago> i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are Because if you independently invented it then it is your own. The value to the student is not necessarily that the idea is novel to everyone else but that is novel to her. And of course the process of invention and development is something that many people never experience, and is valuable in itself.
- IAmBroom 7d ago
- diogenescynic 8d agoThis is something from science fiction or a comic book. Super cool!
- gos9 8d agoWow, must be the same school that keeps pumping out students who invent water powered cars and machines that turn plastic into gasoline. HN with another YouTube shorts tier front page submission.
- enochsstrongest 7d ago[flagged]
- tclancy 7d agoSigned up to simp for Enoch Powell? I’ll grant you that’s original.
- jerf 7d agoMy favorites are: "Power a light with a lifted rock": Actually does work and you can buy this product, but it's a dimmer light for less time than the inevitable marketing diagrams indicate. Not useless but the fawning news stories over the science fair prodigy always makes this sound like an unbelievably brilliant solution rather than a rather niche hack even in the poor rural parts of the world. In the 2020s a standard solar panel, battery, and LED light are much better in every way and far more flexible. "Provide power for a poor rural village from a kicked soccer ball": An absurdly tiny amount of power, at the cost of creating a soccer ball that is soft and doesn't move when you kick it very much, precisely because it's extracting energy from the kick and that energy isn't available to be kinetic energy. No child would ever play with this ball. Have still seen this idea at least three times now despite the fact that if the reporter spent 15 seconds with the actual ball they'd realize it's a complete non-starter. "Science project demonstrates new way to kill $PATHOGEN": It turns out killing things in a petri dish is really easy. It means nothing about human health outcomes in a body. In fact pretty much anything about a pathogen in a petri dish - improving resistance to something, destroying resistance to something... it's really easy to do lots of things in a petri dish. "Water from the air": Doesn't work in practice because the place this needs to be deployed to is precisely the place that doesn't have water in the air. It does work in places that have water in the air but those places also don't need super expensive condensed water when they have water already. I personally live in a place where humidity is basically 90-100% every day in spring, summer, and fall. We don't carefully capture our dehumidifier's water. These are all things I've seen multiple times each.
- jll29 8d agoI will not ask if she patented it, or if others had the idea before, or if it is ready to be productized. Just simply: it is great that young people, driven by personal curiosity, go and explore their ideas, find solutions to long-standing challenges. Billiant, keep inventing!
- shmde 8d agoProve you are a human to continue. No, I dont think I will. closes website Cloudflare at the forefront of gatekeeping everything on the website
- onemoresoop 7d agoThe whole Internet will turn into that unfortunately, it's because of AI agents abusing/overwhelming online resources.
- earth-tattoo 8d agoThe article starts with a lie: Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had. As others have mentioned it's not the first time. So, is the reporter willfully lying, or is so incompetent that couldn't even do a simple Google search? I don't know which is worse.
- rolandog 8d agoI'm not saying you're wrong, but what I'm saying is that children deserve a little bit less froth-in-mouth reactions from us adults. Let's be civil, and give praise for curiosity... given that it takes none to be an armchair inventor.
- retsibsi 7d agoOn my read they are criticising the reporter, not the child. We definitely should be careful, in situations like this, not to be nasty to the kids involved. But I think we should still be allowed to be upset by bullshit, and strongly criticize the bullshitters, even when they are bullshitting about a child.
- xtracto 7d agoIt's shitty reporting. The girl "discovered" the effect by herself, devised a way to use it as a project, and shitty newscasters blew it out of proportion [pun intended]
- commoner 7d agoInfobae has more information (in Spanish) and a video demonstrating the fire extinguisher: https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/08/27/se-puede-apagar-el-fuego-con-sonido-una-estudiante-mexicana-de-16-anos-demostro-que-es-posible-con-un-sistema-disenado-por-ella/ https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/08/27/se-puede-apagar-el...
- ricardobayes 7d agoThis is really good. Firefighting foam is a terrible material, when entering groundwater, is a "forever" source of PFAS.
- 21asdffdsa12 7d agoIf she can get it mobile enough , so it can be transported by a drone - it could be forest fire fighting equipment. Bonuspoints if the energy to run it could be derived from the fire itself.
- rtkwe 7d agoProbably not there's a lot of nearby fire the would reignite extinguished sections because the device doesn't do anything to cool the fuel or suppress fire returning. Also it's short range and very sensitive to the range you use it at. This technique has been known about since at least 2012 when DARPA did a demonstration of it. There's a reason it hasn't really gone anywhere and mostly exists as science fair demos and Youtube videos now, it's quite limited.
- adolph 7d agoThere is/was an X-Prize for that. Looks like finals were last June. https://www.xprize.org/competitions/wildfire https://www.xprize.org/competitions/wildfire
- wkjagt 7d ago> a speaker that emits 30 pulses per second. That vibration pushes oxygen away from the flames Is that really what happens? Wouldn't the fire be surrounded by the same air?
- kazinator 7d agoSound is compression + rarefaction. Maybe the rarefactions reduce pressure enough to wreck the stoichiometry of the burn.
- pyromaniac0 7d agoI remember as a kid somewhat accidentally setting a garbage bin on fire before new year's, and successfully putting it out with one of those big cube firecrackers.
- sandworm101 7d agoI dont see this working on significant fires. Let it run, separate flame from fuel, but what happens a few seconds later? The fuel is still there, the heat is still there, as soon as the sound stops it will reignite. Water/foam and such create both a physical barrier and immediate cooling to prevent reignition. As a general rule, cooling any situation involves throwing cold stuff at the hot stuff. We have many means of projecting heat, but no way to project 'cold' without throwing cold stuff.
- IAmBroom 7d agoWater often puts out fires by diluting the oxygen with steam, giving the embers time to cool off. In practice, the cooling factor is important, but the momentary extinguishment of active flame limits the spread - especially when there is more fuel above.
- CaptWillard 7d agoThat's the real test of a song. Electric fire extinguishers are a crutch, really.
- theo1996 7d agoWow another scam up("start up"+scam) of 5 adults and a teen spokeperson to atract stupid rich people, this tech is >20 years old if not more
- jjgreen 7d agoCatch up -- she's been renamed "an American student"
- fsckboy 7d agorelated to this topic, here is a very interesting little external combustion engine that runs on the heat from a flame directly (i.e. not a steam engine) https://i.4cdn.org/b/1789145070031855.mp4 https://i.4cdn.org/b/1789145070031855.mp4 (completely SFW) (links to 4chan expire in a day or so, so if anybody has a better link for this, future generations will be able to see it too)