Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds
upsocl.comI 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!
The real advancement, not brute forcing mathematical equations like some company does and claims revolutionary breakthrough. How many ideas like this has come from AI companies' models?
This 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.
The real barrier is that Big Extinguisher’s whole revenue model is based on bottle expiration dates.
Wow, 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.
My 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.
"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."
No child would use it, but those would be really awesome in my Muay-Thai classes.
""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."
There is literally no place on earth where the relative humidity is that low outside the Antarctic dry valleys. Even in the Mojave Desert here, I have a water from air condenser out atop a miner's hotel blasted into rock. I even posted the GPS coordinates to it here on HN. It works great, and produces enough clean water daily for several people. It does need a recharge on the carbonate rock and charcoal, though.
My favorite was the kid who invented the cool clock.
My favorite was the student who demonstrated small, leaf-like solar panels on a tower, and claimed that somehow they were more efficient than a single panel.
No. Not possible. Not even going to do the math. Dumb. Somewhat more wind-resistant... unless you add up the support structure weight AND the loss of efficiency when the "leaves" are wind-deflected.
But "Green!", so it got attention.
I wonder if she got the idea from https://www.sonicfiretech.com/
Well, 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
Was looking for a video on this specific work, but only found this [1] where the English translation seems AI-generated. It reminded me of thermoacoustic refrigeration which I found cool (heh) when I had encountered it many years ago - where the compression and rarefaction of sound waves is used to pull out heat. The fire extinguisher seems to operate on a different principle though - it needs to generate a specific kind of turbulence to push out oxygen from the fire site.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGO7Jdfll7c
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoacoustic_heat_engine
There is a saying that ideas are cheap. Only delivery matters.
Wasn't it Edison that said that!
Probably stole it from Tesla... :)
It's kinda a throw-away remark in the middle, but I thought it was really cool to realize that speakers produce an on-axis net-blow and an off-axis net-suck.
I'll bet that high school girl's science was better than what's in that youtube (it doesn't set a very high bar)
This 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.
that comparison says more about you than about how high school girls science is
Watching that dude is like watching a child doing science and then using AI to explain the result. If he makes someone curious enough to do experiments on their own it's still a win though.
It is easy to come away with that idea if you just watch one of his videos. He is very good at clear explanations that get to the essence of an idea and makes it seem simple. Sure, it's at an educational level of detail, but it is accurate on that level.
But if you watch a number of his videos it becomes clear that this is clarity that comes from deep knowledge and sophistication. His channel is also in my opinion notable for having a huge variety of demonstrations, rather than the standard set that is done by a lot of people. There are many things that I've seen only him do, out of my set of science and engineering channels. Which is not to say I know for sure that he is for sure the only one who does them, but it's definitely a more-diverse-than-average set of demonstrations done over the years.
It also, on a more brute level, simply predates AI by a number of years and therefore can't be just an AI script, nor do I see any reason to believe he has switched to using AI to write the scripts.
Prior to “using AI to make videos” he did a phd in chemical engineering. I actually think his explanations and experiments are always very well thought through and presented in a entertaining way
I watch all his videos and they are so easy to understand when to lots of other popular science experiment channels. No high fi stuff, a guy doing experiments with simpler tools available and it's mostly the way he explains things.
Infobae has more information (in Spanish) and a video demonstrating the fire extinguisher:
https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/08/27/se-puede-apagar-el...
Not 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.
Basically 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_wel...
When an oil well goes off, high explosives can be used to extinguish it. Maybe this is the same principle.
Paul Neal "Red" Adair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair
More 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.
To clarify, Red Adair and company did take part in the remediation effort in post Gulf War Kuwait:
https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/red-adair-to-t...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.Buoooo, boooring; I wanna see explosions
Oooh.. from the title I thought this was about an extinguisher for when your guitar catches fire. Makes more sense now
very cool! Can we get a link to a not terrible website with real information?
Bold of you to assume there is real information behind this.
I have a hard time charitably interpreting this comment. Care to explain?
This sounds like a cool science fair project being blown out of proportion by the media.
Where "the media" is a small Chilean blog.
"Cool clock, Ahmed"
Generally, 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.
I'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.
Nevermind 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.
Pangram reports 100% ai
Pangram does not work reliably on single, short sentences.
Conveniently, there was more than a single short sentence to run it on.
> Performing security verification
> Verify you are human
Does anyone else command + w on first sight of a cloudflare screen?
I'll tolerate that but that new QR recaptcha that wants a selfie is 'hell fucking no' from me 100% of the time.
There are captchas that demand selfies now? I have never heard of that before and it sounds completely crazy.
I 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.
Nah, I just have my clanker deal with it. It's better at those stupid puzzles than I am.
Cloudflare doesn't do puzzles. It either says you're a bot or you're not a bot.
Patchright is a patched playwright that clears turnstile and other similar automation hostilities
Love when something decides I'm a bot and the decision is final. (Looking at you, CPU-World -- it even lets me know my IP address has been banned for "abuse", too.)
Right. Because IP addresses uniquely identify people. /eyeroll
Even if I were behind CGNAT (which I'm not), you don't see that message if you're already blocked. They won't even serve you the signup page then.
> 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.
US 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-p...
[2]: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
It’s frustrating that the site wrote that. I’d wager a taco that she never made that claim.
Perhaps a shorter and less formal version of this science news cycle:
Very true, but I don’t see it as a cycle like that comic says. It is more of an unhealthy digestive tract.
I 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.
If 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.
Probably 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.
There is/was an X-Prize for that. Looks like finals were last June.
> 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?
Sound is compression + rarefaction. Maybe the rarefactions reduce pressure enough to wreck the stoichiometry of the burn.
That's the real test of a song. Electric fire extinguishers are a crutch, really.
Why does it matter that she's Mexican?
Stereotyped 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.
Or, you know... people like to know more about the bright kid who came up with a cool idea. Not everything is racism.
either one, yeah
Because it's a Chilean blog about feel good stories in Latin America, just like it says on the tin.
Seems to matter to you
Haha I loved this: in a thread where everybody is talking about the technology, the merits of the kid "discovering" it and all that, invariably there's the guy who enters the room and shouts "why does people care that she is Mexican!!"
Like... nobody cared, until the guy mentions it. And then he replies back "no I don't care she's Mexican, why do you bring their origin!!!"
FWIW I saw these news in my local news Spanish language sources (yep, Im Mexican too) a couple of days ago. And found the majority of the reporting at that time was exactly a "cool science project" thing.
When I saw it here on HN I was surprised. I even thought like "wow, maybe I didn't put a lot of attention, and it's something bigger". But apparently it's just sloppy reporting, in a telephone-game kind of thing: Some Chilean news saw the headline, and decided to report it as "Mexican 16yo invents X", which draws clicks. Then English based news took it and further deformed the actual facts.
Hopefully this kid gets invited to some podcasts or whatnot and gets something from this. Also hopefully it helps other kids get more interested in sciency projects.
No, it doesn't. You're just making a baseless assumption. There's nothing wrong with asking a neutral question.
I wasn't implying anything, just wondering why it needs to be in the title.
This is really good. Firefighting foam is a terrible material, when entering groundwater, is a "forever" source of PFAS.
At 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.
Instead of FM, maybe they can just use an AY-3-8910?
Prove you are a human to continue.
No, I dont think I will. closes website
Cloudflare at the forefront of gatekeeping everything on the website
The whole Internet will turn into that unfortunately, it's because of AI agents abusing/overwhelming online resources.
The 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.
I'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.
On 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.
It'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]
> 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.
for sure, a whole bunch of videos on youtube of various people using acoustics to put out fire. Including MythBusters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2niANODOvJc
But by a 16 year-old Mexican female?
when 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
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?
> 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.
I invented a steam engine when I was in 5th grade. It wasn't completely novel nor efficient, but I invented it independently, and my science teacher showed enough interest to spur a 50-year warm memory.
Praising kids for achievements is a net positive. They use it to focus their energy into future growth and development.
The article is science-reporting trash, of course, but praising the kid is a good thing.
I 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.
out of curiosity, would something like this hurt a human? I assume the sound waves must be pretty powerful to put out a fire.
It'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=AfmBOoqdE...
There'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.
Seems 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.
I 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.
Water 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.
Wow 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
..has been around for a long time.
DARPA worked on it 10+ years ago.
This is something from science fiction or a comic book. Super cool!
The 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.
Yes, 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.
I 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.
Same 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).
I struggle to understand why this article is interesting or upvoted.
The device is acoustic. Think of it as a babel fish for telling fire to stop.
Sure, 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 - I wonder how their "preliminary patent application" went...
Granted, as another post noted: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10569115B2/en
Catch up -- she's been renamed "an American student"