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 […]

“Ingredients in Victoria’s Secret Bombshell and Ivanka Trump eaux de parfums that repel mosquitoes” [research study]

Humanity’s war against mosquitoes still rages, after the failure of another new strategy. This study gives details of the failure: “Ingredients in Victoria’s Secret Bombshell and Ivanka Trump eaux de parfums that repel mosquitoes,” Fangfang Zeng, Pingxi Xu, Kaiming Tan, Paulo Zarbin, Walter Leal, BioRxiv, August 3, 2017, doi.org/10.1101/172304. The authors, at the University of California Davis and Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil, report: “We […]

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 […]

The disgusting (to some people) secrets of smelly (to most people) feet

The smelly feet / Limburger cheese / malaria mosquito research that earned an Ig Nobel Prize (in 2006) has provoked a deeper look at smelly foot smells. David Robson reports, for BBC Future: The disgusting secrets of smelly feet Renate Smallegange is something of a connoisseur of smelly feet – and she goes to surprising […]

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 […]