What’s the News: Forget masking our scent or making us taste bad—sensory overload might be our most potent tool in repelling mosquitoes. And we might someday have a repellent for the job: Scientists have just discovered a molecule that zaps all of a mosquito’s odor receptors at once, overwhelming it. The molecule’s not ready to be deployed yet, but early tests indicate it could be thousands of times more effective than DEET. How the Heck:
In the human olfactory system, a scent molecule—whether it comes from a banana, gasoline, or chocolate cake—binds to a receptor that’s tailor-made for it, triggering a neurological cascade that results in you perceiving that specific smell. But in mosquitoes, there’s an extra step: after the scent molecule binds to its special receptor, that receptor must bind to another, more general receptor to broadcast its signal.
What the team found is a molecule that can jam ...
