What’s the most dangerous creature to humans, beside fellow humans?
So far we humans haven’t had a lot of success in getting rid of the mosquitoes that spread disease, but Microsoft, in collaboration with scientists from a number of universities, is trying to exploit mosquitoes to identify and give early warnings of the spread of infectious diseases around the world.
The overall goal of this project is to monitor infectious agents as they move across the planet. So in the end game we’d like to have a global system available that detects new infectious agents and then monitors their movement as they emerge. In this way we could intervene before they become an epidemic and before they become an infectious problem for humans or wildlife.
–James Pipas, Professor of molecular biology, University of Pittsburgh and participant in Project Premonition
It’s an ambitious project using semi-autonomous drones to place and recover mosquito traps, then analyzing the mosquitoes for the pathogens they are carrying and seeing how those pathogens spread with time. It is obviously a long-range project and there is no guarantee of success, but good for them for trying. I wish them luck!
June 16, 2015
So do I.
It’s an ingenious idea — to let mosquitoes take blood samples, then analyze the results.
well….
I get it, but I wish they would just have all the brilliant minds out there focusing on curing Cancer.
They’re picking a project that uses their talents — computing. I don’t know if it will work, but harnessing the mosquitoes’ ability to take blood samples strikes me as a stroke of genius.