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1Scientists have created a new app designed to identify dangerous mosquitoes based on sounds the insects make.
2The app, called Abuzz, is aimed at helping fight major diseases spread by mosquitoes.
3The diseases - such as malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever - kill hundreds of thousands of people each year.
4Haripriya Vaidehi Narayanan is one of the researchers who helped develop the app.
5She began work on the project as a graduate student at Stanford University.
6She is now with the Department of Immunology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
7Narayanan told VOA that anyone with a mobile phone could use the app to identify mosquitoes.
8"If they see a mosquito around, they just open the phone, open up the app, point their phone towards the mosquito and hit the record button," she said.
9"Then, when the mosquito flaps its wings and starts flying around, it makes that noise, that annoying buzzing noise.
10That noise is what gets recorded by the Abuzz app," she added.
11Many diseases that mosquitoes carry do not have cures or vaccines.
12So, targeting the flying insects is the best way to control them.
13"The most important step is to know where the mosquitoes are," Narayanan said.
14Traditional methods for hunting mosquitos are costly and can take a very long time.
15The process also requires labor-intensive trapping as well as trained scientists to identify the insects.
16Manu Prakash is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and a lead investigator on the project.
17He says that out of about 3,500 different mosquito species, only about 40 are dangerous to humans.
18Prakash says the goal of the project was to find out whether the mosquitoes around a person's house are just an annoyance -- or whether they are possibly dangerous.
19To find out, his team decided to listen.
20When mosquitoes move their wings up and down, they produce buzzing sounds.
21But each kind of mosquito makes a somewhat different buzzing noise. The app records these sounds.
22Users of the app can get an answer by recording as little as one or two seconds of the buzzing sound.
23The app compares this recording to a collection of other recordings.
24It then predicts which species of mosquito it is most likely to be.
25Billions of people around the world can use this tool with their phones.
26So, the researchers say they will be able to monitor mosquitoes on a much larger basis than in the past.
27By crowdsourcing mosquito information worldwide, the app can help build maps of where dangerous mosquitoes are.
28This can help scientists and health officials identify areas where disease is likely to break out and where to target mosquito control.
29Prakash said he believes this kind of widespread community effort can be an important step in fighting mosquito-causing diseases.
30He added that the tool uses machine learning to get better as more people use it.
31"So, we're very excited that if ... hundreds of thousands of people are recording mosquitoes every day - especially around the world - it will create the kind of community that is needed," Prakash said.
32The development team is expected to release the Abuzz app to the public in the coming months.
33Another group of researchers at the University of Oxford in Britain has been developing a similar app, called Mozzwear.
34That app is designed to identify malaria mosquitoes by the sound they make.
35I'm Bryan Lynn.