Athens Breeding "Super Mosquitoes" 458
Chemisor writes "Air pollution and cramped housing conditions in Athens, Greece, are creating a new breed of mosquitoes which are bigger, faster, and can smell humans from farther away. The super insects have color vision and detect humans from 25-30 meters, which is about 50% farther than the ordinary mosquitoe. Beating their wing 500 times a second provides them with extra speed, and the larger bodies (by 0.3ug) presumably allow larger bloodsucking capacity." And in a similar vein (har har) New Scientist had a piece about what mosquitoes like or hate about people.
Makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
As one of the luck few... (Score:3, Insightful)
Patents... (Score:5, Insightful)
How in the world can a chemical that every human produces be patented? Isn't that prior art? Ridiculous. I could understand if it were some new compound they synthesized, but this is a nothing more than greed.
Dan East
'Compares favorably' to DEET? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, DEET does absolutely nothing to repel biting insects from me. If this new stuff 'compares favorably' to DEET, I guess I have nothing to look forward to here.
It doesn't really have to work though... He just needs to put 'Organic' on the bottle, and people will buy it even if they have no clue what the hell is in there. They'll swear it works too.
Size? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Patents... (Score:5, Insightful)
Without that protection, his recipe would be a closely guarded secret and there is the possibility that his death, or a fire in the factory, or a hard drive crash, would result in the formula being lost. Then we all lose. That's the way things used to work, and that's why we can't make violins as good as Stradivarius, or swords out of damascus steel (or buildings out of it for that matter).
Patents do benefit mankind. It's not this guy's fault that politicians have perverted the system.
Re:why not earlier? (Score:3, Insightful)
And then the gorillas freeze to death?
Re:Size? (oops) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Patents... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, we could just use DDT and there's no problem. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Patents... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, according to patent law, he doesn't deserve anything. Patent law does not recognize a discovery as an invention. They can patent a particular means of synthesizing this chemical or extracting it from some other animal or plant, but they cannot and should not be able to patent the discovery itself. Patenting the chemical would be like discovering that you can make some particular type of object out of wood and then patenting trees.
If they get a patent on this discovery, it will be quite possibly the ultimate affront to God and humanity. Don't be surprised if their lab gets struck by lightning repeatedly (in the same place).
Re:Natural Resistance to Venom? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's merit to what you say, as I became immune to poison ivy, likely from all the contact i had with it, but posion ivy won't give you a host of diseases if you come in contact with it, which a mosquito might.
Re:Patents... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Color vision (Score:3, Insightful)