Kaya, environment reporter Peter de Kruijff here.
In a classic conditioning experiment, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov set off a metronome before giving a group of dogs food.
After repeating this a few times, the dogs start salivating at the sound of a metronome without any food being present.
This somewhat accidental discovery — given Pavlov was actually focused on digestive studies — at the end of the 19th century spawned a plethora of conditioning experiments.
One recent experiment pondered whether a species of mosquito (Aedes aegypti) could be conditioned to overcome an aversion to insect repellent by associating its smell with food.
Why would they do this? Because it's unclear exactly why mosquitoes avoid human skin covered in repellent.
One line of thought is that repellents like DEET create a neurotoxic or irritating effect for a mosquito, while another theory is DEET has an odour which indicates some sort of danger.
A group of researchers figured it was more likely the latter if mosquitoes could overcome the smell of DEET.
And so they put mosquitoes into individual tubes where they could access a bag of sheep blood for 20 seconds, followed by 10 seconds being submitted to the smell of DEET.
After repeating the training three times about 60 per cent of the mosquitoes were no longer repelled by the smell of DEET.
You can find out more about what happened when the mosquitoes were set on the scientists themselves — and what this means for making more effective repellents — in this story by science reporter Ellen Phiddian.
Ellen also stopped by at Lab Notes with Jonathan Webb to chat about how lead is hiding in some clothing.
While over at the Science Show there is a tribute to parasitologist Bridget Ogilvie and a panel chat from the Australian National Maritime Museum on whether we can use AI to talk whale.
That's all for this week, if you have thoughts on the newsletter or a sciency photo to share, get in touch by sending an email.
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