Today the Ig Nobel Prizes made another appearance on the Jeopardy! TV game show, this time as an answer. It refers to the 2006 Ig Nobel Biology Prize, which concerned malaria mosquitoes, human feet, and Limburger cheese. Note: The Jeopardy! wording refers to the cheese as being German, but Limburg, home of the fragrant 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
If you are a malaria mosquito, and worry about insecticides that might cause you to lose one, two, three, four, or five of your six legs would also cause you to miss a meal of human blood… well, maybe you can ease up, a bit, on that particular worry. That’s what this new study suggests, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ig Nobel prize winner Bart Knols has been awarded a research grant from the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation. (Knols and colleague Ruurd de Jong shared the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in biology for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell […]
Bart Knols, who won the 2006 Ig Nobel biology prize, for ‘for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet’ recently wrote a book (in Dutch). It is titled ‘Mug’ and tells how mosquito’s have influenced the history of […]