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Technology

App can tell you if a mosquito is about to give you malaria

By Nicole Kobie

23 November 2017

a mosquito about to land on skin

Should you worry?

Stephen Dalton/Nature Picture Library/Getty

A mosquito bite can infect you with malaria, dengue or zika, diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. But how can you tell if the mosquitoes near you are dangerous? Well, now there’s an app for that.

Only 40 of the 3500 mosquito species bite humans. It would be nearly impossible to identify the dangerous kinds by sight alone: two species of mosquito may look identical, for example, but one prefers animals to humans. However, every species has a unique sound signature. They “sing” to…

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