Buttery perfume deters mosquitoes by overloading their sense of smell

Every time you exhale, you send out a beacon to hungry mosquitoes. These vampires follow their noses. They’re exquisitely sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air, and can follow faint traces over long distances. Constant streams of the gas won’t do – the mosquitoes are waiting for the rhythmic pulses of carbon dioxide, such as those given off by a breathing human. Once they find such a plume, they fly headlong into it, tracking it back to its blood-filled source. This tracking ability makes it hard to avoid the attention of mosquitoes, or the diseases that they transmit with their bites. You could simply hold your breath to avoid giving off any telltale gases and because you would quickly die, malaria and dengue fever would not be a problem. But there is a better way. Stephanie Lynn Turner and Nan Li from the University of California, Riverside, have found a ...