#63 Dengue Fever, African Rice and Lunar Eclipse
Discover 3 science news from the latest 24 hours in our #PeerusWhatsNew, now on Medium.
1 A promising test was conducted in Australia by CSIRO researchers to fight dengue fever.
More than 80% of a colony of mosquitoes spreading dengue fever were wiped out in an Australian city during this test. Researchers reproduced millions of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that were sterilized before being released. For more than three months, they fertilized females that laid eggs that had not hatched, causing a vertiginous drop in their population.
“We are very pleased to see a significant removal of these dangerous female biting mosquitoes Aedes aegypti,” said Nigel Snoad, of the life sciences company Verify (Alphabet), who funded the project.
2 The analysis of genetic data of African rice opens possibilities for the agriculture of tomorrow facing global warming.
By sequencing 246 wild and cultivated African rice genomes, researchers have shown that the domestication of rice cultivation in Africa occurred three millennia ago in northern Mali.
If the emergence of a cultivated form of rice in Africa is the result of a climate change that took place thousands years ago, it is now possible that the genetic traits of African rice could help the plant to survive and adapt to the new climate changes that are emerging, researchers said.
3 The longest lunar eclipse of the century, expected to last more than 4 hours in some parts of the globe, will take place on July 27, 2018.
The Moon will offer a great show that a large part of the world can follow, more or less completely. This eclipse will be doubled in addition to a Blood Moon, a phenomenon that will drape the nocturnal star of glowing colors.
An eclipse can only take place when our satellite, viewed from Earth, is in the opposite direction to the Sun and is therefore in a full moon phase.
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