Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. To combat the deadly diseases spread by mosquitoes, entomologists often turn to the blood-sucking insect's reproductive life. Deactivating their sperm, using a mosquito kill bucket to take out mosquito larvae, and now researchers are creating something akin to a sexually-transmitted disease just for mosquitoes. In a study published earlier this year in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of scientists from the United States and Burkina Faso in West Africa, detailed how they delivered a deadly fungal infection to female mosquitoes. The females are the ones who bite and spread disease to humans.

The possibilities are endless including: "how AI may be used to tackle such Grand Challenges, they are continuing to research how we can achieve more nuanced decisions through training machines to understand the impacts of seasonality; explore more intervention options; target interventions to specific populations; deploy across locations; and account for dynamic changes in the environment as we observe new real-world data. This I believe would bring us closer to the objective of malaria eradication with AI."

Around half of the world's population is at risk of contracting malaria and it causes around half a million deaths each year. However, the parasites that cause malaria are becoming more resistant to the drugs we currently use to combat them, meaning the global malaria risk stands to increase if we don't develop new drugs quickly enough. Well new research published recently in Scientific Reports finds that a common chemical used in everything from soap and toothpaste to clothing and furniture might be an effective treatment, and it was done with the help of AI. Many popular antimalarial drugs target a specific enzyme found in malaria-causing parasites, an enzyme important for the parasites' growth. So researchers used AI-powered Robot Scientist Eve to screen a slew of FDA-approved compounds to see how well they were able to inhibit that enzyme and it found that triclosan was able to inhibit the enzyme from two different species of malaria-causing parasites, including variants that had developed resistance to common malaria treatments. The researchers then tested triclosan against the enzyme in a number of different ways in order to confirm its effectiveness, and that, combined with previous research showing that the chemical can also inhibit an additional enzyme found in these parasites, led the researchers to conclude that triclosan may be a useful therapeutic with multiple targets.