The entomologist who seduced malaria mosquitoes with cheese

“Bart Knols, the entomologist who seduced the mosquito mosquito with cheese” says the headline of this Telemetro [Panama] profile of Ig Nobel Prize winner Bart Knols and his innovations against malaria. The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded to Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical […]

Stinky-feet-and-cheese researcher’s research gets new attention

Ig Nobel Prize winner Bart Knols‘s sure-footed malaria-mosquito research is featured in a new Discovery Channel documentary called “Mosquito.” The New York Times celebrates “Mosquito,” contrasting it with the “frivolous” Shark Week films that the TV network is famed for: “Deadlier Than Sharks: A Documentary Spotlights the Mosquito.” Here’s a promotional chunk of the film: Knols and Ruurd […]

Carnivorous, Green Approach to Getting Malaria Mosquitoes

A progress report on a slow, steady approach to controlling malaria: “Using carnivorous plants to control malaria-transmitting mosquitoes,” Jasper Ogwal-Okeng, Mary Namaganda, Godfrey Sande Bbosa, James Kalema, Malaria World, 2013, 4, 10. (Thanks to investigator Bart Knols for bringing this to our attention.) The authors report: “This GCE project set out to develop a novel […]

Study: Smelly socks for malaria control

Cesar Sanchez of the TwistedBacteria blog alerts us to this new study, which was derived from the Ig Nobel Prize-winning work of Bart Knols and Ruurd de Jong (who showed that many malaria mosquitoes are attracted equally to the smell of human feet and the smell of limburger cheese): “Sugar-fermenting yeast as an organic source […]