Sifting the truth from AI-generated content should now be a core responsibility for public health institutions, according to global health experts from Monash University Malaysia Kent Buse and Sarah Hawkes.

Notorious malaria-carrying Anopheles coluzzii mosquitoes are skillful foragers, speedily biting the skin and efficiently probing for blood vessels before feeding, then retracting and withdrawing their mouthparts – all in five distinct steps, new research observes. These blood-hungry insects combine a chemical sensing toolkit with biomechanical coordination that differs from the well-documented strategy used by yellow fever-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Female mosquitoes from the Anopheles genus are notorious transmitters of malaria. Until now, how they choose where to munch – finding the juiciest subcutaneous blood vessels – and how they take a bite has remained a mystery. Here, Joanna Konopka and colleagues have described in great detail the biting process of female Anopheles coluzzii mosquitoes, which are endemic to sub-Saharan Africa. Using video, electrophysiological monitoring, and deep learning, they analyzed mosquitoes’ behavior before and after the insects bit the same human host. The mosquitoes synchronized their mouthparts with leg movements as they prodded the skin to find the best spot to munch. The insects employed 5 behaviors – piercing, vessel searching, blood ingestion, retraction, and withdrawal – in the subsequent biting and guzzling phases. The team also modified two genes used for chemical sensing to create mutant An. Coluzzii. Doing so caused the mosquitoes to change their biting process slightly, indicating that An. Coluzzii relies on chemical cues as well as innate motor behaviors. Finally, the authors compared An. Coluzzii’s biting dynamics with the yellow fever vector, Aedes aegypti, finding that An. coluzzii bites faster and hunts for blood vessels more quickly. “Anopheles coluzzii pierces the skin in an abrupt manner (rapidly stabbing the stylet into the skin), while Ae. aegypti does so more gradually (maintaining rhythmic pattern of piercing),” they write. They note this could be why Anopheles bites can be more painful while Aedes bites go unnoticed.

A new device can detect scents and transmit them between people across distances, with the potential for long-range transmission. It marks another stage in the development of human-machine interfaces: enabling the sharing of smell. Human-machine interfaces (HMIs) such as smartphones were once avant-garde, translating the fourth sense (touch) to share information virtually with others. Now, researchers are exploring ways to use HMIs to exchange other senses such as smell. Chunyu Yang and colleagues have designed an AI-supported wearable made of an e-nose and their new scent release platform, called Scentronic. They trained the e-nose to recognize the smell of beer, cake, coffee, oranges, and red wine through machine-learning identification of the substances’ volatile organic compounds. Then, they used Scentronic to convey odors to distant users. The device comes in two designs: a lightweight wristband with two odor channels for easy whiffing or a necklace with five odor channels aligned “like pearls on a string” for expedient sniffing. Yang et al. tested Scentronic’s performance with up to 16 volunteers. They also combined the interface with a flavor simulator (a water-filled cup that flavoring liquid dribbles into), using a model and preexisting parameters to gauge how this enhancement could work in the future. “This has broad applications for patients with nutritional challenges and populations like astronauts (facing unappealing food supplements) or warfighters (consuming field rations), where enhancing perceived food quality can have critical nutritional/performance outcomes,” the authors write. They also note that clinicians could one day use a device like theirs to evaluate patients’ sense of smell more accurately by exposing them to varying levels of odor intensity.