Altering our ‘flavour’ to fight malaria
Scientists have identified an area of the mosquito brain that mixes taste and smell, an advance that may help find a substance that makes “human flavour” repulsive to the malaria-bearing species. Using the substance, the mosquitoes instead of feasting on humans may keep the disease to themselves, potentially saving an estimated 450,000 lives a year worldwide, researchers said. “All mosquitoes, including the ones that transmits malaria, use their sense of smell to find a host for a blood meal,” said Christopher Potter, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US. “Our goal is to let the mosquitoes tell us what smells they find repulsive and use those to keep them from biting us,” said Potter. Malaria is an infectious parasite disease of humans and animals transmitted by the bite of the female Anopheles gambiae mosquito. In 2015, experts estimated it affected 214 million people, mostly in Africa, despite decades of mosquito eradication and control efforts.
Poor sleep can impair facial recognition
lack of proper sleep may impact the accuracy of facial identification, according to a new study, which could have important implications for those working in security or forensic settings. It is often necessary to identify unfamiliar people by comparing face images: For example a CCTV image to a mugshot, or a passport photograph to a traveller. Researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia and the University of Glasgow in the UK found that accuracy of these decisions is impaired by poor sleep. However, the study also found that poor sleepers were just as confident in their decisions, highlighting possible implications for security and policing.
longer you yawn, bigger your brain
Researchers from the State University of New York have found evidence that the animals with bigger brains are more variable in the length of their yawns. The researchers scanned YouTube to find a bunch of different animals yawning. They looked at the videos of 29 mammals yawning to calculate the average length of their yawns. The animals had their brain weight already documented in an earlier research. When the researchers crunched the numbers, they realised that brain weight and the number of neurons in the outer layer of the brain called cortex can reliably predict yawn length. For instance, gorillas, horses, walruses and African elephants may have huge sizes but they have shorter yawns than humans because the size of their brains are smaller compared with ours. The findings suggest that the length of yawn does not correlate to the size of the body but to the size of the brain, Tech Times reported.