From VOA News
November 16, 2020
The high-pitched whine of a mosquito is annoying, but scientists have developed an app that uses that sound to detect dangerous mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes kill hundreds of thousands of people each year by spreading microbes that cause diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever. But researcher Haripriya Vaidehi Narayanan says anyone with a cellphone can help tackle these diseases by using the Abuzz app to identify mosquitoes.
“If they see a mosquito around us, they just open the phone, open up the app, point their phone towards the mosquito and hit the record button,” said Narayanan, who started working on the project as a graduate student at Stanford University. She’s now in the Department of Immunology at the University of California Los Angeles.
“So then, when the mosquito flaps its wings and starts flying around, it makes that noise, that annoying buzzing noise … that noise is what gets recorded by the Abuzz app,” she added.