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January 14, 2016 10:10 am PST
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/OswVKbUIals/why-its-so-hard-to-make-a-be.html
Why it's so hard to make a better mosquito repellent
Since 2008 Leslie Vosshall, director of the Vosshall Laboratory at Rockefeller University, has been working on making a better mosquito repellent than DEET. In this Atlantic article by Ed Yong, she explains why it's so hard to keep the tiny vampires from sucking our blood.
Narrowly focusing on a single sensory pathway to stop mosquitoes is doomed, she says, because they track their prey with so many different cues. Its an incredibly smart strategy. From the mosquitos point of view, there are a lot of unreliable signals in nature, so they integrate multiple pathways. They have a Plan B at every point.
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/OswVKbUIals/why-its-so-hard-to-make-a-be.html
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