And the This week when water goes from life saver to life destroyer. We analyze the growing

threat of flooding.

Plus in the news, GM mosquitoes that can't spread malaria,

General Relativity celebrates its 100th birthday,

and what really did in the dinosaurs.

I'm Katani and I'm Chris Smith and this is the Naked Scientist.

The Naked Scientists podcast is powered by UKfast.co. UK.

UK. A mosquito which has been genetically engineered to prevent the spread of malaria, has been

unveiled by scientists in the US this week.

Now malaria affects about 300 million people every year and it leads to hundreds of thousands

of deaths, more than 70% of them in young

children. This new mosquito carries genes that will enable it to block the growth of

the malaria parasite so that it can't pass on the disease.

And what's clever about this new approach,

which is referred to as a gene drive,

is that the scientists have engineered the insects

in such a way that when they mate,

they automatically pass on the anti-malarial genes, meaning that over time

the entire mosquito population should eventually become malaria resistant.

Anthony James at the University of California Irvine is leading the

project. What we're doing here is putting genes into mosquitoes that make it so the

parasite will not survive in the mosquito and if if we do that, then the parasite can't complete

...