The power of flowers and fungi is no match for these insects. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It can turn ants into "zombies," help fictional plumbers grow, and even look like creepy fingers . One newly engineered strain of fungus uses the power of smell to kill Earth's deadliest animal --mosquitoes. Mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria and dengue, kill thousands of people per year.

Large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate impressive long-horizon reasoning capabilities. However, their reliance on static internal knowledge limits their performance on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks and hinders their ability to produce comprehensive research reports requiring synthesis of diverse web information. To address this, we propose WebThinker, a deep research agent that empowers LRMs to autonomously search the web, navigate among web pages, and draft reports during the reasoning process. WebThinker integrates a Deep Web Explorer module, enabling LRMs to dynamically search, navigate, and extract information from the web when encountering knowledge gaps. It also employs an Autonomous Think-Search-and-Draft strategy, allowing the model to seamlessly interleave reasoning, information gathering, and report writing in real time. To further enhance research tool utilization, we introduce an RL-based training strategy via iterative online Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments on complex reasoning benchmarks (GPQA, GAIA, WebWalkerQA, HLE) and scientific report generation tasks (Glaive) demonstrate that WebThinker significantly outperforms existing methods and strong proprietary systems. Our approach enhances LRM reliability and applicability in complex scenarios, paving the way for more capable and versatile deep research systems. The code is available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/WebThinker.

West Nile virus is a significant, and growing, public health issue in the United States. With no human vaccine, mosquito control programs rely on accurate forecasting to determine when and where WNV will emerge. Recently, spatial Graph neural networks (GNNs) were shown to be a powerful tool for WNV forecasting, significantly improving over traditional methods. Building on this work, we introduce a new GNN variant that linearly connects graph attention layers, allowing us to train much larger models than previously used for WNV forecasting. This architecture specializes general densely connected GNNs so that the model focuses more heavily on local information to prevent over smoothing. To support training large GNNs we compiled a massive new dataset of weather data, land use information, and mosquito trap results across Illinois. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms both GNN and classical baselines in both out-of-sample and out-of-graph WNV prediction skill across a variety of scenarios and over all prediction horizons.

Mosquito-borne diseases pose a major global health risk, requiring early detection and proactive control of breeding sites to prevent outbreaks. In this paper, we present VisT ext-Mosquito, a multimodal dataset that integrates visual and textual data to support automated detection, segmentation, and reasoning for mosquito breeding site analysis. The dataset includes 1,828 annotated images for object detection, 142 images for water surface segmentation, and natural language reasoning texts linked to each image. The YOLOv9s model achieves the highest precision of 0.92926 and mAP@50 of 0.92891 for object detection, while YOLOv11n-Seg reaches a segmentation precision of 0.91587 and mAP@50 of 0.79795. F or reasoning generation, we tested a range of large vision-language models (LVLMs) in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our fine-tuned Mosquito-LLaMA3-8B model achieved the best results, with a final loss of 0.0028, a BLEU score of 54.7, BERTScore of 0.91, and ROUGE-L of 0.85. This dataset and model framework emphasize the theme "Prevention is Better than Cure", showcasing how AI-based detection can proactively address mosquito-borne disease risks.

The low battery autonomy of Unnamed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) can make smart farming (precision agriculture), disaster recovery, and the fighting against dengue vector applications difficult. This article considers two approaches, first enumerating the characteristics observed in these three IoT application types and then modeling an UAV's battery recharge coordination using the Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) approach. In this way, we propose that each drone inside the swarm does not communicate concerning this recharge coordination decision, reducing energy usage and permitting remote usage. A total of 6000 simulations were run to evaluate how two proposed policies, the BaseLine (BL) and ChargerThershold (CT) coordination recharging policy, behave in 30 situations regarding how each simulation sets conclude the simulation runs and how much time they work until recharging results. CT policy shows more reliable results in extreme system usage. This work conclusion presents the potential of these three IoT applications to achieve their perpetual service without communication between drones and ground stations. This work can be a baseline for future policies and simulation parameter enhancements.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to the development and deployment of an autonomous mosquito breeding place detector rover with the object and obstacle detection capabilities to control mosquitoes. Mosquito-borne diseases continue to pose significant health threats globally, with conventional control methods proving slow and inefficient. Amidst rising concerns over the rapid spread of these diseases, there is an urgent need for innovative and efficient strategies to manage mosquito populations and prevent disease transmission. To mitigate the limitations of manual labor and traditional methods, our rover employs autonomous control strategies. Leveraging our own custom dataset, the rover can autonomously navigate along a pre-defined path, identifying and mitigating potential breeding grounds with precision. It then proceeds to eliminate these breeding grounds by spraying a chemical agent, effectively eradicating mosquito habitats. Our project demonstrates the effectiveness that is absent in traditional ways of controlling and safeguarding public health. The code for this project is available on GitHub at - https://github.com/faiyazabdullah/MosquitoMiner

As the summer begins to wane, cases of mosquito-borne diseases are creeping up in some parts of the United States. In other regions, the threat of malaria is a more constant issue even as vaccines continue to roll out. However, some new research on how they mate may help develop better improved techniques for controlling the mosquitoes that carry malaria. For male mosquitoes–who do not bite–the high-pitched buzzing of females is siren call that signals it is time to mate. However, there is even more to that signal than scientists first realized.

This paper presents a robust fault tolerant control scheme that is designed to meet the control challenges encountered by such robots, i.e., discrete actuator inputs, complex system modeling and cross-coupling between actuators. In the proposed scheme, a desired vectorial system output, such as a position or a force, is commanded by recruiting actuators based on their influence vectors on the output. No analytical model of the system is needed; influence vectors are identified experimentally by sequentially activating each actuator . For position control tasks, the controller uses a probabilistic approach and a genetic algorithm to determine an optimal combination of actuators to recruit. For motion control tasks, the controller uses a sliding mode approach and independent recruiting decision for each actuator . Experimental results on a four degrees of freedom binary manipulator with twenty actuators confirm the method's effectiveness, and its ability to tolerate massive perturbations and numerous actuator failures.

Treatment of stagnant water bodies that act as a breeding site for malarial vectors is a fundamental step in most malaria elimination campaigns. However, identification of such water bodies over large areas is expensive, labour-intensive and time-consuming and hence, challenging in countries with limited resources. Practical models that can efficiently locate water bodies can target the limited resources by greatly reducing the area that needs to be scanned by the field workers. To this end, we propose a practical topographic model based on easily available, global, high-resolution DEM data to predict locations of potential vector-breeding water sites. We surveyed the Obuasi region of Ghana to assess the impact of various topographic features on different types of water bodies and uncover the features that significantly influence the formation of aquatic habitats. We further evaluate the effectiveness of multiple models. Our best model significantly outperforms earlier attempts that employ topographic variables for detection of small water sites, even the ones that utilize additional satellite imagery data and demonstrates robustness across different settings.

As low-quality housing and in particular certain roof characteristics are associated with an increased risk of malaria, classification of roof types based on remote sensing imagery can support the assessment of malaria risk and thereby help prevent the disease. To support research in this area, we release the Nacala-Roof-Material dataset, which contains high-resolution drone images from Mozambique with corresponding labels delineating houses and specifying their roof types. The dataset defines a multi-task computer vision problem, comprising object detection, classification, and segmentation. In addition, we benchmarked various state-of-the-art approaches on the dataset. Canonical U-Nets, YOLOv8, and a custom decoder on pretrained DINOv2 served as baselines. We show that each of the methods has its advantages but none is superior on all tasks, which highlights the potential of our dataset for future research in multi-task learning. While the tasks are closely related, accurate segmentation of objects does not necessarily imply accurate instance separation, and vice versa. We address this general issue by introducing a variant of the deep ordinal watershed (DOW) approach that additionally separates the interior of objects, allowing for improved object delineation and separation. We show that our DOW variant is a generic approach that improves the performance of both U-Net and DINOv2 backbones, leading to a better trade-off between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation.