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Guaranteed Human.

If you live in most places in the United States, mosquitoes are a massive annoyance.

They've ruined a good hike.

They've ruined a beautiful night camping under the stars,

they ruin delicious picnics,

and they ruin breathtaking sunsets.

They are the worst.

But if you live in an area

where mosquitoes carry deadly diseases

like malaria, dengue, yellow fever, or zika,

they're also potentially deadly. According to

the Centers for Disease Control, malaria alone killed 597,000 people in 2023. So what are our

options? Mosquitoes have developed resistance to our insecticides, and insecticides in general aren't great for ecosystems because they often kill a bunch of other stuff as well.

But what if we could use new genetic tools to drive some mosquito species to extinction or make those mosquitoes resistant to diseases so they can no longer transmit those diseases to us.

Today, we're going to respond to some listener questions about mosquitoes.

We'll chat about how mosquitoes find us, how genetic engineering could be used to combat

mosquitoes, and how you undertake the tricky task of estimating how mosquito population sizes

are changing over time.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's mosquito-infested universe.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I have a top five list of animals I'd like to see genocided off the planet.

Oh, man, starting an episode with the word genocide. I'm not loving that. Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I was going to say I'm

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