#diseasetransmission — Public Fediverse posts

A new study comparing the attraction of three different mosquito species to 119 different people found species-specific differences in the mosquitos' attraction to certain body odors. One species, Aedes aegypti, was more attracted to men than women.

Summary: https://refractor.io/biology/different-humans-attract-mosquito-species/

Original paper (preprint): https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.30.702931v3

#Science #Mosquitos #DiseaseTransmission

Simulating a Sneeze

Sneezing and coughing can spread pathogens both through large droplets and through tiny, airborne aerosols. Understanding how the nasal cavity shapes the aerosol cloud a sneeze produces is critical to understanding and predicting how viruses could spread. Toward that end, researchers built a “sneeze simulator” based on the upper respiratory system’s geometry. With their simulator, the team mimicked violent exhalations both with the nostrils open and closed — to see how that changed the shape of the aerosol cloud produced.

The researchers found that closed nostrils produced a cloud that moved away along a 18 degree downward tilt, whereas an open-nostril cloud followed a 30-degree downward slope. That means having the nostrils open reduces the horizontal spread of a cloud while increasing its vertical spread. Depending on the background flow that will affect which parts of a cloud get spread to people nearby. (Image and research credit: N. Catalán et al.; via Physics World)

#aerosols #biology #coughing #COVID19 #diseaseTransmission #droplets #flowVisualization #fluidDynamics #physics #science #sneezing #turbulence

Simulating a Sneeze

Sneezing and coughing can spread pathogens both through large droplets and through tiny, airborne aerosols. Understanding how the nasal cavity shapes the aerosol cloud a sneeze produces is critical to understanding and predicting how viruses could spread. Toward that end, researchers built a “sneeze simulator” based on the upper respiratory system’s geometry. With their simulator, the team mimicked violent exhalations both with the nostrils open and closed — to see how that changed the shape of the aerosol cloud produced.

The researchers found that closed nostrils produced a cloud that moved away along a 18 degree downward tilt, whereas an open-nostril cloud followed a 30-degree downward slope. That means having the nostrils open reduces the horizontal spread of a cloud while increasing its vertical spread. Depending on the background flow that will affect which parts of a cloud get spread to people nearby. (Image and research credit: N. Catalán et al.; via Physics World)

#aerosols #biology #coughing #COVID19 #diseaseTransmission #droplets #flowVisualization #fluidDynamics #physics #science #sneezing #turbulence

Simulating a Sneeze

Sneezing and coughing can spread pathogens both through large droplets and through tiny, airborne aerosols. Understanding how the nasal cavity shapes the aerosol cloud a sneeze produces is critical to understanding and predicting how viruses could spread. Toward that end, researchers built a “sneeze simulator” based on the upper respiratory system’s geometry. With their simulator, the team mimicked violent exhalations both with the nostrils open and closed — to see how that changed the shape of the aerosol cloud produced.

The researchers found that closed nostrils produced a cloud that moved away along a 18 degree downward tilt, whereas an open-nostril cloud followed a 30-degree downward slope. That means having the nostrils open reduces the horizontal spread of a cloud while increasing its vertical spread. Depending on the background flow that will affect which parts of a cloud get spread to people nearby. (Image and research credit: N. Catalán et al.; via Physics World)

#aerosols #biology #coughing #COVID19 #diseaseTransmission #droplets #flowVisualization #fluidDynamics #physics #science #sneezing #turbulence

Simulating a Sneeze

Sneezing and coughing can spread pathogens both through large droplets and through tiny, airborne aerosols. Understanding how the nasal cavity shapes the aerosol cloud a sneeze produces is critical to understanding and predicting how viruses could spread. Toward that end, researchers built a “sneeze simulator” based on the upper respiratory system’s geometry. With their simulator, the team mimicked violent exhalations both with the nostrils open and closed — to see how that changed the shape of the aerosol cloud produced.

The researchers found that closed nostrils produced a cloud that moved away along a 18 degree downward tilt, whereas an open-nostril cloud followed a 30-degree downward slope. That means having the nostrils open reduces the horizontal spread of a cloud while increasing its vertical spread. Depending on the background flow that will affect which parts of a cloud get spread to people nearby. (Image and research credit: N. Catalán et al.; via Physics World)

#aerosols #biology #coughing #COVID19 #diseaseTransmission #droplets #flowVisualization #fluidDynamics #physics #science #sneezing #turbulence

Simulating a Sneeze

Sneezing and coughing can spread pathogens both through large droplets and through tiny, airborne aerosols. Understanding how the nasal cavity shapes the aerosol cloud a sneeze produces is critical to understanding and predicting how viruses could spread. Toward that end, researchers built a “sneeze simulator” based on the upper respiratory system’s geometry. With their simulator, the team mimicked violent exhalations both with the nostrils open and closed — to see how that changed the shape of the aerosol cloud produced.

The researchers found that closed nostrils produced a cloud that moved away along a 18 degree downward tilt, whereas an open-nostril cloud followed a 30-degree downward slope. That means having the nostrils open reduces the horizontal spread of a cloud while increasing its vertical spread. Depending on the background flow that will affect which parts of a cloud get spread to people nearby. (Image and research credit: N. Catalán et al.; via Physics World)

#aerosols #biology #coughing #COVID19 #diseaseTransmission #droplets #flowVisualization #fluidDynamics #physics #science #sneezing #turbulence

@therockyfiles

This underscores a point I try to make from time to time, when I sound more bearish about the future of humanity than the climate scientists are: What threatens humankind is more than just the first-order effects of Climate.

You see Trump and others characterizing the Climate movement as a fear that we will drown from sea level rise. That's not the risk. There are secondary and tertiary risks, such as crop failures and consequent famine. But migration of animals of all kinds will happen, and some of those animals are as small as mosquitos.

This means that climate scientists are not the only experts we should be talking to in order to understand the climate problem. Diseases, insects, crops, etc. will become increasingly important. Not only are climate experts at risk of experiencing "Peter Principle" effects if they stretch too far, pretending expertise in areas they don't have, but we as a public will be blind to important dimensions of risk analysis that only an expert in these other fields would see.

In effect, it means that if a climate expert tells you about a certain set of risks, they are almost necessarily low-balling that risk for lack of ability to cover the space. And it means we as a public are planning timelines that are way too generous.

#climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateExpertise #ClimateRisks #mosquitos #mosquitoes #disease #DiseaseTransmission

Experiments using a #Daphnia-#microparasite system reveal that #DiseaseTransmission models that only model dynamics at among-host scale incorrectly predict the direction of effect of short-term temperature variability @leilakrichel &co #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3LhLykz