Date Time
Why male mosquitoes leave humans alone
A side-by-side comparison of the fruitless gene in the female (left) and male (right) mosquito brain.
Male mosquitoes won’t bite you. For one thing, they cannot-males are hopelessly bad at finding humans and lack a specialized stylet to pierce your skin. But even if they could bite you, they would not want to. They refuse blood meals served to them in the lab through netting, even as their female counterparts engorge on what must appear to be a free lunch.
Now, a new study from the laboratory of Rockefeller’s Leslie Vosshall helps explain why. It appears that both mosquito sexes share the same neurons and brain structures needed to find humans, but that this hardware is hidden in the male mosquito brain, locked behind a simple genetic switch. Mutate the right gene, the researchers discovered, and male mosquitoes begin buzzing toward human scents in search of a prize that they do not even want.
29 Dec 2020
A research paper concluding that working with female mentors might hurt young women’s careers in the sciences has been retracted after fierce criticism from “group email threads” and on social media. The academic journal that published the paper apologized for “any unintended harm derived from the publication of this paper.”
A study published in the peer-reviewed journal
Nature Communications was retracted following backlash from people who were uncomfortable with the paper’s findings, according to a report by Inside Higher Ed.
The research paper studied a variety of dynamics within three million mentor-mentee research pairings, including the “possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career,” reported Inside Higher Ed.