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June 22, 2021 // Posted In Academics, Research
Mosquitoes are a fact of life each summer, and they’re far more than an annual annoyance. Globally, they’re a leading source of the spread of diseases like Zika, West Nile Virus and malaria, claiming nearly a million lives each year.
We all fight them but these four Baylor professors have taken the fight to the next level, focusing their research efforts on distinct approaches to combatting mosquitoes:
Dr. Cheolho Sim, associate professor of biology, is searching for the genetic “on-and-off switch” that tells mosquitoes to prepare for dormancy in the winter. He is part of a team that recently earned a $532,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to, essentially, learn how to trick mosquitoes; the grant will support research into the genes that impact a mosquito’s circadian rhythm, seeking to find the trigger that tells a mosquito to get ready for a cold season. If they discover this, Sim says, they could “control
A view of the night sky from the Antelope Canyon, Page, Arizona. Photo: Ameer Basheer/Unsplash
Americans invented the idea of national parks. They sing of amber waves of grain and sublime purple mountain majesties. They’ve made the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone shrines of national identity and idealise nature in speeches, literature, painting, photography and architecture.
And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity and politics, with contradictory conceptions of nature at the heart of a broken national consensus.
To Native Americans, nature and culture are inseparable, and the identity and the history of a tribe is thoroughly interwoven with specific places, such as Rainbow Bridge or the San Francisco Peaks. In contrast, many White Americans embrace wilderness, defined as nature that is free of human presence, with no roads, telephone lines or electricity. The wilderness is, to them, eternal and pre-human, an idea at odds with b