Slashdot Mirror
Google Has a Plan To Eliminate Mosquitoes Around the World (bloombergquint.com)
Zorro shares a report: Silicon Valley researchers are attacking flying bloodsuckers in California's Fresno County. It's the first salvo in an unlikely war for Google parent Alphabet: eradicating mosquito-borne diseases around the world. A white high-top Mercedes van winds its way through the suburban sprawl and strip malls as a swarm of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes shoot out of a black plastic tube on the passenger-side window. These pests are tiny and, with a wingspan of just a few millimeters, all but invisible. "You hear that little beating sound?" says Kathleen Parkes, a spokesperson for Verily Life Sciences, a unit of Alphabet. She's trailing the van in her car, the windows down. "Like a duh-duh-duh? That's the release of the mosquitoes."
Jacob Crawford, a Verily senior scientist riding with Parkes, begins describing a mosquito-control technique with dazzling potential. These particular vermin, he explains, were bred in the ultra-high-tech surroundings of Verily's automated mosquito rearing system, 200 miles away in South San Francisco. They were infected with Wolbachia, a common bacterium. When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch. Better make that 79,999. "One just hit the windshield," says Crawford. Mosquito-borne disease eradication is serious stuff for Alphabet, though it is just one of many of the company's forays into health care and life sciences.
Jacob Crawford, a Verily senior scientist riding with Parkes, begins describing a mosquito-control technique with dazzling potential. These particular vermin, he explains, were bred in the ultra-high-tech surroundings of Verily's automated mosquito rearing system, 200 miles away in South San Francisco. They were infected with Wolbachia, a common bacterium. When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch. Better make that 79,999. "One just hit the windshield," says Crawford. Mosquito-borne disease eradication is serious stuff for Alphabet, though it is just one of many of the company's forays into health care and life sciences.
...can you equip them to get rid of the mosquitoes too? They're getting annoying. You can at least make them less annoying by getting rid of the mosquitoes.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do you want fewer mosquitoes, for at least a little while, or not?
If so, shaddup!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Sure, where these are not native, eliminating them not too long after they turn up is probably not going to kill anything else. But where they are native, somethings will hunt them and they may have other functions. In the worst case, you get a chain reaction and a lot of things change. This may well make the situation worse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But we can't adequately keep track of variables in software we've written.
Isn't it perhaps a tad presumptuous to think that we've taken into account all the variables in our reverse engineering of nature? I appreciate this mindset would mean no progress - but perhaps a halfway house, where we're not... yanno... attempting to make a massive modification, like "killing off an entire species"?
Do you want fewer mosquitoes, for at least a little while, or not?
If so, shaddup!
No, I'd rather maintain a reasonable amount of biodiversity.
If mosquitoes went extinct: Mosquito larvae are very important in aquatic ecology. Many other insects and small fish feed on them and the loss of that food source would cause their numbers to decline as well. Anything that feeds on them, such as game fish, raptorial birds, etc. would in turn suffer too. Mosquitoes can be wiped out but the ecological damage that would be necessary (draining swamps/wetlands, applying pesticides over wide areas), along with strict regulatory enforcement, would make eradication not worth it unless there was a very serious public health emergency.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
> Zika wasn't a problem in South America until genetically modified mosquito were released in Brazil.
That smells like bullshit. Got any proof other than a random tinfoil shoutout from an anonymous coward account? Doing a few searches shows that this sounds like a new wingnut talking point, ignoring actual facts.
a) The people doing that were definitely not bright-eyed hacks.
b) Nothing else depends on Polio and Smallpox being there. Eradicating a disease and eradicating a species are two very different things.
Knowledge on your side needed, not a citation.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.