Mosquito repellents are key to protect ourselves from mosquito bites and the pathogens they might carry. The most widely used active ingredient in insect repellents is N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide, commonly known as DEET.

Highly effective, long-lasting (approximately five hours) and cheap to make, DEET is a gold-standard insect repellent. But even though it was developed more than 80 years ago, there are important gaps in our understanding of how DEET actually works.

A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology led by Claudio Lazzari from the University of Tours, France, now shows mosquitoes can be conditioned to be attracted to DEET.

This provides an important piece of the puzzle in our understanding of how DEET works, and hints that this important mozzie repellent could have a vulnerability.

A vital tool that’s not fully understood

Insect repellents are a major method of protection against mosquito-borne diseases including malaria, dengue, chikungunya, Ross River virus, Japanese encephalitis virus and more. Many of these diseases are expanding on a global scale due to travel, urbanisation and climate change.

Female mosquitoes transmit parasites and viruses when they feed on vertebrate blood, which they need to provide proteins for egg development. To find their next blood meal, mosquitoes are strongly attracted to odours and physical cues emitted by warm-blooded “hosts”, including humans.

These include carbon dioxide we exhale, lactic acid in our sweat, and a complex combination of other chemicals that varies between people. Mosquitoes detect all these with sensory organs located in their antennae, proboscis (the pointy mouth part they use to suck blood) and the maxillary palps that flank it.

DEET has been in widespread commercial use since the 1950s, but there’s a lot of scientific debate over how exactly it works as a mozzie repellent. Is it blocking the odour of the host, is it toxic to the mosquito, or something else?

In 2008, groundbreaking research showed DEET blocks the response of sensory neurons to host odours in mosquitoes and vinegar flies. This means DEET is likely “confusing” the mosquito rather than repelling it. A couple of years later, scientists found a small portion of mosquitoes exposed to DEET are insensitive to it, and it’s a heritable trait.

This means mosquitoes do have a physiological response to DEET. But there are also signs some of the mozzie reactions are behavioural. In one study, mosquitoes exposed to DEET were less sensitive to it if exposed again within three hours. This hints they can temporarily get used to the chemical.

What did the new study find?

The new study shows it’s possible to condition mosquitoes to bite more if they’re repeatedly exposed to DEET during a blood meal. Not only does this tell us more about how it repels mosquitoes, but it raises the prospect mosquitoes may actually be attracted towards DEET in some cases.

First, the researchers developed a behavioural test. They kept mosquitoes in tiny cages and moved a food target (a warm bag of blood) towards them, recording proboscis movements when they sensed the target. This was the “biting attempt response”.

To test things further, the team ran a classical conditioning experiment. Mosquitoes were run through one of five “training programs” exposing them to various combinations of an unconditioned stimulus (heat), a conditioned stimulus (short exposure to DEET in a plume of air) and a reward (a short opportunity to feed on blood).

Here’s where it gets surprising. The mosquitoes whose training program included a squirt of DEET while they were already feeding on blood, afterwards had a significantly higher biting response when exposed to DEET again.

If the mosquitoes were exposed to DEET before being offered the blood bag, none of them tried to bite it.

Then, one of the researchers boldly offered her hands up for testing. One of the hands was treated with DEET. About 50% of the mosquitoes who went through the DEET-blood meal training program tried to bite the hand coated in DEET. By contrast, 100% of untrained mozzies avoided the hand covered in DEET and went for the clean one instead.

What does all this mean?

It’s well established mosquitoes can learn and retain information. What they learn about hosts and their environment can in turn have an impact on disease transmission.

This study indicates DEET doesn’t just affect mosquitoes physiologically. There’s a cognitive response as well, which could be an important part of how it works.

The authors raise the possibility – if the concentration of DEET is not high enough to repel mosquitoes but they still sense it during a blood meal, would these mosquitoes then be more likely to bite people who smell of DEET?

It’s important to note the study happened in highly controlled lab conditions, and the training program the mozzies underwent may not reflect everyday scenarios. Future studies should try and come up with test conditions that better represent real-world situations to see if these results hold up.

At a time when mosquito-borne diseases are on the rise, DEET still provides highly effective protection. What this study contributes is an improved understanding of how DEET works – and how we might improve insect repellents in the future.

Leon Hugo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child and Anna Poletti’s Hello, World? are very different books. Scodellaro won the 2024 Novel Prize; her book stitches together a history of Black feminist poetry, theory and prose. Poletti’s novel is a work of queer erotic introspection, investigating the limits of domination and submission.

There’s not much to connect them in terms of style, theme or ambition. If there is a common anchor, it is that both dispense with the traditional mechanisms of narrative. They abandon conventional chapter and paragraph forms, prioritising “fragments” as the unit of construction.

Ruins, Child – Giada Scodellaro (Giramondo)

Hello, World? – Anna Poletti (Puncher & Wattmann)

Because of this experimental approach, these books might be considered “avant-garde”. This is a loaded term that originally referred to soldiers who scouted ahead of the army. The military metaphor was attached, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to writers and artists who worked in spaces yet to be cleared by human consciousness.

Sometimes, but not always, these artists were aligned with progressive politics, and sought to use their works to help people imagine a different, more liberated future.

Neither Ruins, Child nor Hello, World? attempt this gesture. Scodellaro’s novel is interested in the experience of “lateness”; Poletti’s uncovers some of the bonds that make personal progress a fraught project. Both dwell in a kind of political melancholy where the priorities are not revolution, but survival and care.

If these are the radical novels charting new territory in the 2020s, they raise an important question: what does the “avant-garde” look like today?

Hello, World?

Anna Poletti is an Australian queer and feminist media-studies scholar who works in Utrecht. The endorsements on the back cover of her book come from Chris Kraus and McKenzie Wark, heavy hitters of theory and postmodern literature.

Hello, World? follows Seasonal, a genderqueer academic, who moves to the Netherlands for a job. After they break up with their long-term partner, they undergo a sort of katabasis: a journey into the underworld of their deeper sexual drives.

The book compares itself to Pauline Réage’s erotic novel The Story of O and the work of the notorious French libertine the Marquis de Sade. It spends most of its time exploring Seasonal’s dominant/submissive relationship with Laszlo, a self-exiled Hungarian.

The Kraus endorsement calls the book “radical”, and it’s true that it depicts a kind of relationship that is usually kept hidden. Poletti goes to the root of kink culture, trying to chart the ethics that sustain a relationship ultimately built on structured violence.

But the fragmentary approach, which moves between vignette-paragraphs and long text-message exchanges, allows the author to avoid some of the more intense moments between the characters. The book often stops just short of showing us the interior of the erotic relationship. It is elliptical about things that might be interesting for a reader of queer erotica.

That seems to be part of the point. The real subject of the book is the modulations of the relationship, as each character tries to avoid tipping the scales from domination to exploitation.

Seasonal often muses on their relationship to their own trauma. They are troubled when Laszlo uses the language of violence to describe them. It seems neither character can fly by the nets of their cultural and sexual conditioning.

In its exploration of the limits of trauma and violence, Hello, World? does chart somewhat virgin waters. Seasonal is an interesting creation. While they wax theoretical about relationships, they garble judgements about art and politics, declaring no interest in learning about either. They discard their long-term partner with relative ease when he says he won’t have sex with them.

They are straightforwardly dedicated to their own pleasure, in the best Sadean fashion, and largely indifferent to the suffering of those around them.

This complex portrait uncovers some interesting aspects of the doctrine of personal sexual liberation. Seasonal’s fairly uncritical embrace of identity politics and communitarianism leads to a sympathy with some of the arguments of Viktor Orban’s Hungarian nationalism. For all the rejection of the Enlightenment in the novel, the only thing that separates kink from abuse ends up being rational consent.

In the end, Seasonal’s pursuit of sexual freedom makes them into the sort of person they have spent their life rejecting.

As a diagnosis of the politics of self, Hello, World? works quite well. But its deconstruction of progressivism and internalised hetero-patriarchy is not “avant-garde”, nor particularly radical. I wonder what sort of circulation it will have outside the coterie of media-studies lecturers.

Ruins, Child

Like Hello, World?, Ruins, Child is a novel of fragments. But it arranges its fragments in a very different way. It is a tessellate of a huge number of texts drawn from the tradition of Black poetics and radicalism.

The notes identify the main texts as the writings of August Wilson, Toni Cade Bambara, Derek Walcott, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and June Jordan. References to art, architecture, music and film are woven through the book.

The image on the front cover is a collage by Lorna Simpson, and collage is certainly one way we might think about Ruins, Child. The narrative is based on Bannu Cennetoglù’s HOWBEIT, a video-art project comprising 128 hours of footage taken between 2006 and 2018. The setting of the novel, Scodellaro explains in her notes, recalls the idea of “The Hill”, a figure of suburban ghettoisation in the work of Wilson and Bambara. The central characters are in constant dialogue with Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters (1980), which Ruins, Child seems to be remixing.

The novel assembles these parts into a fascinating puzzle, revolving around six characters watching footage taken earlier in their lives. The women live in a crumbling apartment tower, shunted there by a neglectful government. They watch their past selves prepare for a carnival and trade boyfriends, and as the oldest of them, Vonetta, endures a seemingly endless pregnancy. Reality is stretched across decades. We are often left guessing the time and place of a given event.

This indeterminacy of time is right at the heart of the novel. Events seem to be taking place in the not-too-distant future. There is something vaguely prognostic about the world we are creating today: infrastructure and the old forms of society are eroding; the natural cycle of the seasons has given way to extremes of heat and cold.

But this is not an attempt to think about the future, so much as a consideration of what has already been lost. Scodellaro draws on the work of architects Peter Eisenman and Elisa Iturbe, whose theory of “lateness” in architecture is a sort of metaphor for what Ruins, Child is doing with history. Instead of building something new, the novel is picking up pieces. Vonetta, the eternal mother, laughs at people who want to “live in the near future”. She suggests “the mother does not aim for this, she does not think about being avant-garde”.

Philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin mused that ruins, like other fragments, call out for the critic and historian to make them whole again. This means trying to revive the ideas and dreams that went into their creation before they were destroyed.

Ruins, Child brings together the pieces of nearly a century of Black radical writing in a similar gesture of salvation. It dwells in the moments of allegiance and solidarity that have allowed the oppressed to survive in a crumbling world.

Inwards and backwards

Poletti’s hello, world? reflects some cynicism about the progressive project; Scodellaro’s novel explicitly rejects the idea of being “avant-garde”. But neither book has its eyes set on the artistic or political horizon. They turn their eyes inwards and backwards, explaining our failed liberation or saving what they can as the world hurtles to oblivion.

I think both are conservative postures. It may well be that these ways of adapting to our present have contributed to us being where we are. There is a kind of easy melancholy in dwelling on the contradictions of personal politics and stooping to retrieve the relics of the past.

Scodellaro’s book is a wonderfully wrought collage; its clever construction rewards close reading. Poletti’s book has less to offer, though it does carry some important lessons in its slippery portrait of Seasonal.

Neither book is utopian, because neither really believes in politics. That our boldest books are restrained and intimate rather than forward-looking and activist is, I think, as telling a fact about literature in the mid-2020s as anything else.

Giacomo Bianchino does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

With 48 teams and 104 games across 16 host cities and three countries (the United States, Canada and Mexico), this year’s FIFA World Cup is projected to be the biggest sporting event ever in terms of attendance, revenue and global viewership.

It also promises to be the most technologically advanced, and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular will touch almost all aspects of the tournament.

This reflects a growing use of AI in soccer and across elite sport, with tools being applied not only to optimise athlete performance but also enhance match officiating, event security and fan experience.

Let’s look at how AI will be used in the World Cup, who may benefit and what risks could emerge.

Read more: We tested the new World Cup ball – this is what you need to know about how it will fly, dip and swerve

How it will be used on the pitch

In our review of AI use in soccer we found various ways it can assist on the pitch:

• tools to support player, team and match evaluation
• forecasting of match outcomes and in-game events (such as expected goals and assists, corners, passes, opposition tactics)
• monitoring athlete workload
• injury prediction and detection
• talent scouting.

At the World Cup, coaches will use AI alongside more conventional data to inform how they approach each game, including what opposition strengths they need to negate and what weaknesses they can exploit.

Similarly, high performance staff will use AI to monitor player health and wellbeing, and forecast potential injuries.

The dreaded penalty shoot-out is one area where AI will have a direct influence. Teams will use AI to synthesise historical data to provide insights on goalkeepers and penalty takers’ likely strategies.

A key benefit is the speed at which these analyses can be undertaken. What used to take days of old-fashioned human legwork can now be done in hours, even for entire squads.

Should a game go to a shootout, AI could very likely influence the winning kick or save.

What about referees?

Match officials will also be supported by AI.

While semi-automated offside technology was introduced in the 2022 World Cup, it will be enhanced through the addition of AI-enabled 3D avatars of every player. The aim is to improve referees’ decision accuracy through the use of more precise body dimensions of the players involved.

The avatars will also be used to provide more engaging content when Video Assistant Referee (VAR) decisions are shown to fans. Rather than seeing only generic figures, fans will now see realistic avatars incorporating players’ faces, kit and even their hairstyle.

Another use in match officiating will be referee view technology, which uses body cameras to capture in-game footage from the referee perspective. AI will be used to stabilise images, with the emphasis on enhancing the fans’ immersive experience.

What about off the field?

Crowd management and logistics are other areas where AI will be deployed.

FIFA has built an “Intelligence Command Centre” – which will connect data across matches, venues and broadcasters – as well as digital twin models of stadiums to monitor and forecast crowd behaviour.

This will aim to ensure crowd-related issues such as bottlenecks are controlled.

Are there any risks?

While there are many benefits, a broad spectrum of risks will need to be managed.

Key concerns with AI tools are substandard outputs, and loss of skills and meaningful work for humans. To combat this, teams should ensure AI is only used to support human decision making, not replace it.

Data privacy and security will be key concerns, with the possibility of confidential or sensitive information being leaked or accessed by unauthorised or malicious actors. The use of AI in areas such as security and crowd management could also provide the opportunity for highly disruptive cyber attacks.

Equality could be an issue: teams with more financial power may have an advantage through more sophisticated tools.

In an attempt to level the playing field, FIFA has introduced Football AI Pro, an AI tool available to all teams. This soccer-specific large language model supports both pre- and post-match analysis and provides access to more than 2,000 metrics.

The aim is to ensure all nations have access to at least some level of AI support. It remains to be seen which nations actually use it.

Another potential adverse outcome is tactical homogenisation, where games become predictable because every team follows the same AI-generated game plan.

Sadly, AI will likely be deployed for nefarious purposes, for example as part of ticketing scams through AI-generated images, deepfakes, websites and phishing emails. Fans should take care at all times.

AI will be everywhere

AI is fast becoming a key component of high performance sport. It will be leveraged throughout the tournament to support preparation, performance and recovery.

While it could increase the gap between larger and smaller nations, it might also give smaller nations a new edge.

So could 2026 be the year in which AI genuinely contributes to a World Cup win? We won’t see an AI agent scoring a goal, or a robot coach calling the shots (at least not yet) but there is no doubt the winner of the tournament will have relied on AI along the way.

In terms of who that will be – well, we could always ask AI.

Paul Salmon receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Isaiah Jesse Elstak receives Commonwealth funding through an Australian government research training program scholarship.

Scott McLean does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.