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Tag: Western world

  • Your Next Mosquito Repellent Might Already Be in Your Shower

    Your Next Mosquito Repellent Might Already Be in Your Shower

    For as long as I can remember, I have been that friend—the one who, from May to November, gets invited to every outdoor soiree. It’s not because I make the best desserts, even though I do. It’s because, with me around, the shoes can come off and the DEET can stay sheathed: No one else need fear for their blood when the mosquitoes are all busy biting me.

    Explanations abound for why people like me just can’t stop getting nipped—blood type, diet, the particular funk of the acids that emanate from our skin. Mosquitoes are nothing if not expert sniffers, evolving over millennia to detect the body’s many emissions, including the carbon dioxide we exhale and the heat we radiate.

    But to focus only on a mosquito’s hankering for flesh is to leave a whole chapter of the pests’ scent-seeking saga “largely overlooked,” Clément Vinauger, a chemical ecologist at Virginia Tech, told me. Mosquitoes are omnivores, tuned to sniff out blood and plants. And nowadays, most humans, especially those in the Western world, tend to smell a bit like both, thanks to all the floral, citrusy lotions and potions that so many of us slather atop our musky flesh.

    That medley of scents, Vinauger and his colleagues have discovered, may be an underappreciated part of what makes people like me smell so darn good to pests. The findings are from a small study with just five volunteers, four brands of soap, and one mosquito species, and still need to be confirmed outside the lab. But they’re a reminder that, as good or as bad as some of us might inherently smell to a mosquito, the insects experience us as dietarily diverse smorgasbords—not just as our animal selves.

    Read: You have no idea how good mosquitoes are at smelling us

    Researchers have also long known that “everything we use on our skin will affect mosquitoes’ behavior or attraction toward us,” says Ali Afify, a mosquito researcher at Drexel University. That includes extracts from plants—among them, chemicals such as citronella and limonene, which have both been found to repel the bloodsucking insects in at least some contexts. Something about encountering floral and faunal cues together seems to bamboozle mosquitoes, as if they’re “seeing an organism that doesn’t exist,” says Baldwyn Torto, a chemical ecologist and mosquito expert at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology. After all, female mosquitoes, the only ones that bite, spend their lives toggling between seeking nectar and hunting for blood, but never both at the same time. That’s part of why Vinauger initially figured that soap might deter mosquitoes from flying in for a sip.

    The story ended up being a bit more complicated. The researchers, led by Morgen VanderGiessen and Anaïs Tallon, collected chemicals from their volunteers’ arms—one scrubbed with soap, the other left aromatically bare—and offered them to the mosquitoes. One body wash, a coconut-and-vanilla-scented number made by Native, seemed to make a subset of people less appetizing, probably in part, Vinauger told me, because mosquitoes and other insects are not into coconut. (Duly noted.) But two other cleansers, made by Dove and Simple Truth, bumped up the attractiveness of several of their volunteers—even though all of the soaps in the study contained plenty of limonene. (None of the manufacturers of the body washes used in the study responded to a request for comment.)

    No single product was a universal attractant or repellent, which probably says more about us than it does about body wash. A bevy of lifestyle choices and environmental influences can tweak an individual’s unique odor profile; even identical twins, Torto told me, won’t smell the same to a mosquito on the prowl. Soaped up or no, some people will remain stubbornly magnetic to mosquitoes; others will continue to disgust them. This makes it “hard to say, ‘Hey, this soap will make you really attractive’ or ‘That soap will keep mosquitoes completely away from you,’” says Seyed Mahmood Nikbakht Zadeh, a chemical ecologist and medical entomologist at CSU San Bernardino, who wasn’t involved in the study. Plus, soap is hardly the only scented product that people use: Whatever enticing ingredients your body wash might contain, Tallon told me, could easily be counteracted by the contents of your lotion or deodorant.

    Read: A pivotal mosquito experiment could not have gone better

    The point of the study isn’t to demonize or extol any particular products—especially considering how few soaps were tested and how many factors dictate each individual’s odor profile. The five volunteers in the study can’t possibly capture the entire range of human-soap interactions, though the researchers hope to expand their findings with a lot of follow-up. “I wouldn’t want the public to be alarmed about what type of soap they’re using,” Torto told me.

    But just knowing that personal-care products can alter a person’s appeal could kick-start more research. Scientists could design better baits to lure skeeters away from us, or develop a new generation of repellents using gentle, plant-based ingredients that are already found in our soaps. “DEET is really efficient, but it’s a chemical that melts plastic,” Vinauger told me. “Could we do better?”

    The researchers behind the study are already trying. After analyzing the specific chemicals in each of the soaps they tested, they blended some of the most alluring and aversive substances into two new concoctions—a flowery, fruity attractant and a nuttier repellent—and offered them to the insects. The repellent was “as strong as applying DEET on your skin,” Vinauger told me, “but it’s all coming from those soap chemicals.”

    What’s not yet clear, though, is how long those powers of repulsion last. Most people don’t manage more than a daily scrub; meanwhile, “the odors coming out of your pores are continuously coming out, so in the long run, those might win out,” says Maria Elena De Obaldia, a neurogeneticist who previously studied mosquito attraction at Rockefeller University. And it’s a lot less practical to ask someone to shower every few hours than to simply reapply bug spray.

    Read: A new way to keep mosquitoes from biting

    I’m certainly not ready to blame my mosquito magnetism on my body wash (which, for what it’s worth, contains a lot of “coconut-based cleanser”) or anything else in my hygiene repertoire. Part of the problem is undoubtedly just me—the tastiest of human meat sticks. But the next time I shop for anything scented, I’ll at least know that whatever wafts out of that product won’t just be for me. Some pest somewhere is always catching a stray whiff.

    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Thanksgiving’s Most Underrated Food

    Thanksgiving’s Most Underrated Food

    Since the start of 2022, I’ve consumed more than my body weight in sweet potatoes. The average American eats closer to the equivalent of one (1) fry a day, but for the past decade, I’ve had at least half a pound of the roots at almost every dinner. I travel with sweet potatoes more reliably than I travel with my spouse. All I need in order to chow down is a microwave and something to cushion my hands against the heat.

    Tomorrow, Americans will finally put sweet potatoes in the spotlight—and still not appreciate all that they’re worth. Families across the country will smother the roots with sugar and butter beneath a crunchy marshmallow crust. This classic casserole may be the only serving of sweet potatoes some people have all year—which is a travesty in terms of both quantity and (sorry) preparation style. Sweet potatoes deserve so much more than what Thanksgiving serves them. And maybe they’d get it, if they weren’t so misunderstood.

    For starters, sweet potatoes are not potatoes or yams. Each belongs to a distinct family of plants. And although potatoes and yams are technically tubers, a riff on a plant stem, sweet potatoes are a modified root. The common name doesn’t exactly help, which is why many experts want to change it from sweet potato to … sweetpotato. Even in grocery stores, confusion abounds. A small part of Lauren Eserman-Campbell, a geneticist and sweet-potato expert at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, dies every time she spots a can of Bruce’s Yams.

    Mostly, the sweet potatoes in American markets resemble Bruce’s (Not) Yams: orange-fleshed, brown-skinned, sugary, moist. But the plant’s true range is much more diverse. The outside comes in earthy umbers, ruddy reds and purples, and sandy beiges; the interior can be cream, buttercup yellow, cantaloupe, lilac, even a shade of violet that verges on black. Some are rather watery; others are almost as dry and starchy as bread. Not all of them are even perceptibly sweet. And thanks to the plant’s zany genetics—six copies of each of 15 chromosomes—nearly every combo of color, texture, taste, shape, and sugar and water content can spring out of a cross between, say, a dryish, veiny purple and a moist, smooth-skinned orange. Craig Yencho, a sweet-potato breeder and geneticist at North Carolina State University, told me that, given enough time, “I could find a sweet potato that would be enjoyable to just about any consumer.”

    The common misconception that potatoes are fattening and devoid of nutrition (slander!) might make some people assume the same or worse of sweet potatoes. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Pit their nutritional profile against other staple crops, such as rice, wheat, and corn—all of which command a larger share of the world market—and, in many respects, “sweet potato is on top,” says Samuel Acheampong, a geneticist at the University of Cape Coast, in Ghana. The orange-fleshed varieties, in particular, come chock-full of iron, zinc, and beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A; the purples are rich in cancer-fighting anthocyanins. Even sweet-potato leaves are a powerhouse, packed with folate and a surprising amount of protein. Also, they’re delicious stir-fried.

    Read: America’s lost story of crops rewrites the history of farming

    Sweet potatoes tend to get America’s attention only in November, but they’re hardy, flexible, and ubiquitous enough to be an anytime, anywhere kind of food. They’ve taken root on every continent, save for Antarctica; they’ve been rocketed into space. Acre for acre, sweet potatoes also yield edible crop far more efficiently than many other plants do, “and that is really important in families where they don’t have enough quality food,” says Robert Mwanga, a sweet-potato geneticist based in Uganda, where some locals eat the roots at nearly every meal. In Kenya, sweet potatoes have sustained communities when other crops have failed. Among some populations, the roots have earned an apt moniker: cilera abana, protector of the children.

    But even among scientists, sweet potatoes get, if not a bad rap, at least an underwhelming one. “It’s a tiny community, and there’s not a lot of funding,” Eserman-Campbell told me. “I went to a sweet-potato breeders’ meeting one time, and I just thought there would be more people there.” It doesn’t help that the plants can be a bit of a genetic pain, Mwanga told me. Their many copied chromosomes make breeding tricky, and new sweet-potato varieties can be propagated only by clonal cuttings. Among consumers, the sweet potato has also struggled to shed its reputation as a poor person’s food, turned to in times of famine or war and culturally linked to rural, low-income farmers.

    People in the Western world are catching on—especially now that nutritionists so often tout sweet potatoes as a superfood, says Ana Rita Simões, a taxonomist at Kew Gardens, in London. In the past decade, demand for Yencho’s sweet potatoes has tripled, maybe quintupled; “I have never seen a crop take off like that,” he said.

    Read: The correct time to eat Thanksgiving dinner

    Culinarily, though, Americans are still batting in the sweet potato’s minor leagues. The big hitter remains the Thanksgiving casserole—a dish Acheampong likes but remains a bit mystified by. “You guys add a lot of sugar,” he told me, which is amusing, considering that the orange-fleshed varieties are already plenty sweet. Plus, the casserole is (gasp) under the thumb of Big Confection: Its invention was commissioned as part of a ploy to sell more marshmallows. It’s sugar all the way down.

    I am not here to yuck anyone’s yam; I celebrate any dish that features sweet potatoes. More preferable, though, would be casting these wonderful roots in a starring role. In other parts of the world, sweet-potato recipes run the gamut from sugary to savory, from appetizer to main to dessert. They’re pureed, stir-fried, noodle-fied; they’re blended into soups, beverages, and pastries. They’ve even found their way into booze. Imagine how they could dress our Thanksgiving tables: sweet potatoes roasted; sweet potatoes grilled; sweet potatofurkey—I mean, why the heck not.

    Read: How to engineer the optimally delicious Thanksgiving plate

    Or perhaps there is a more modest proposal to be made: Enjoy the roots all on their own. Yencho, like me, is a purist; he likes his sweet potatoes plain, baked until soft, no condiments necessary. They just don’t need anything else.

    Katherine J. Wu

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  • The Double-Negative Election

    The Double-Negative Election

    This has become the double-negative election.

    Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.

    Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an NBC national survey released last weekend, half of registered voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and congressional Democrats want to do, but more than that said the same about congressional Republicans and Trump. About half of all voters said they had little, or no, confidence in either party to improve the economy, according to another recent national survey from CNBC.

    Read: Why this election is so weird

    It remains likely that two negatives will still yield a positive result for Republicans. Most voters with little faith in both sides may ultimately decide simply to give a chance to the party that’s not in charge now, Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct the CNBC survey, told me. That would provide a late boost to the GOP, particularly in House races, where the individual candidates are less well known. But even if that dynamic develops, Campbell said, the Democrats’ ability to hold so much of their coalition over concerns about the broader Republican agenda has reduced the odds that the GOP can generate the kind of decisive midterm gains enjoyed by Democrats in 2018 and 2006, or Republicans in 2010 and 1994.

    If Republicans make only modest gains this fall, it will be a clear warning that the party, as currently defined by Trump’s imprint, faces a hard ceiling on its potential support. But even a small Republican gain would send Democrats an equal warning that concerns about the GOP’s values and commitment to democracy may not be sufficient to deny them the White House in 2024. “If I was advising the Biden administration, I would say this is the No. 1 priority: Fix the fundamentals,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of a new book on the 2020 presidential election, The Bitter End, told me. “The biggest priority is inflation, and everything else is secondary.”

    By precedent, Democrats should be facing a rout next month. That’s partly because the first midterm election for a new president is almost always tough on his party, but also because most voters express deep pessimism about the country’s current conditions. Despite robust job growth, the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, and tumbling stock markets has generated intense economic dissatisfaction. National surveys, like last week’s CNBC poll, routinely find that on key economic measures, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats by double-digit margins. A September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly three-fifths of voters say Biden’s policies have weakened the economy, compared with only about one-third who say they have strengthened it.

    Given those attitudes, academic models predict that Democrats should lose about 40 to 45 House seats next month, Sides recently noted.

    Likewise, Democrats are swimming upstream against the growing tendency of voters to align their selections for the Senate with their assessment of the incumbent president. In 2018, Republicans lost every Senate race in a state where Trump’s approval rating in exit polls stood at 48 percent or less; in 2010, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where then-President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent or less. This year, Biden’s approval rating does not exceed 45 percent in any of the states hosting the most hotly contested Senate races, and more often stands at only about 40 percent, or even less.

    These precedents could ultimately produce Republican gains closer to these historic benchmarks. In polling, the party out of the White House traditionally has gained strength in the final weeks before midterm voting, as most undecided and less-attuned voters break their way.

    Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that dynamic could be compounded this year because independent and less partisan voters remain focused on inflation (rather than the issues of abortion and democracy animating Democrats) and express preponderantly negative views about the economy and Biden’s performance. Campbell agreed that for those reasons, independent voters could move against Democrats, especially in House races. The number of blue-leaning House districts where Democrats are nonetheless spending heavily on defense in the final weeks testifies to that likelihood. Several House-race forecasters have recently upped their projections of likely Republican gains closer to the midterm average since World War II for the party out of the White House, about 26 seats.

    But even with all of these formidable headwinds, Democrats have remained highly competitive in polling on national sentiment for the House, and in the key Senate battlegrounds (including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). And although Democrats face unexpectedly difficult challenges in governor’s races in New York and Oregon, they remain ahead or well within reach in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To be sure, Democrats are not decisive favorites in any of these races (except for governor of Pennsylvania), but despite the gloomy national climate, neither have any of these contests moved out of their reach.

    That’s largely because the party has minimized defections and increased engagement from the key groups in its coalition—including young people, college-educated voters, women, and people of color—by focusing more attention on issues where those voters perceive the Trump-era GOP as a threat. Weak or extreme Republican candidates have eased that work in several of these Senate and governor races.

    But another factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans.

    Read: What to expect when you’re expecting a Republican house

    For instance, the latest national NBC survey, conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, found that 48 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who promised to continue Biden’s policies. That sounds ominous for Democrats, but voters were slightly more negative about a candidate who promised to pursue Trump’s policies (50 percent less likely). Only about one-third of independents said they preferred a candidate who would continue the policies of either Biden or Trump. All of that tracks with the survey’s other finding that although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).

    Other polls have also found this double-barreled skepticism. The latest CNBC poll (also conducted by the Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies team) found the two parties facing almost identically bleak verdicts on their ability to improve the economy: Only a little more than one-fifth of voters expressed much confidence in each party, while more than three-fourths expressed little or none.

    When a Yahoo/YouGov America poll recently asked whether each party was focusing on the right issues, only about 30 percent of voters in each case said yes, and about half said no. Only about one-fourth of women said Republicans have the right priorities; only about one-fourth of men said Democrats have the right priorities. The capstone on all of these attitudes is the consistent finding that most Americans (an identical 57 percent in the Yahoo/You Gov survey) don’t want either Biden or Trump to run again in 2024.

    In baseball, they say a tie goes to the runner. The political analogue might be that equally negative assessments of the two parties are likely to break in favor of the side out of power. Campbell points out that while a striking 81 percent of independents say they have little or no confidence in Republicans to improve the economy, that number rises to 90 percent about Democrats. In the NBC survey, voters who said they mostly disagreed with both Biden’s and Trump’s policy agenda preferred Republicans to control Congress by a margin of three to one, according to detailed results provided by McInturff.

    Democrats seem acutely, though perhaps belatedly, aware of these challenges. They now warn that Republicans, if given control of one or both congressional chambers, would threaten Medicare and Social Security, most pointedly by demanding cuts in return for raising the federal debt ceiling next year. But it’s not clear that those arguments can break through the lived reality of higher prices for gas and groceries squeezing so many families. “Inflation, rising gas prices, interest rates—those are things people feel every day,” Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster for Trump in 2020, told me recently. “There is no TV commercial that is going to change what they feel when they go to the grocery store or the gas station.”

    The challenge those daily realities pose to Democrats is not unique: As the political analyst John Halpin recently noted, “inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments” across the Western world (as demonstrated by England’s recent chaos and the election of right-wing governments in Sweden and Italy). No democratically elected government may enjoy much security until more people in its country feel secure about their own finances. For Democrats, the risk of an unexpectedly bad outcome next month seems greater than the possibility of an unexpectedly good one.

    Republican gains this fall would only extend a core dynamic of modern American politics: the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other. If Democrats lose one or both congressional chambers, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president who went into a midterm election with unified control of government has lost it. The prospect of very tight races next month in almost all of the same states that decided the 2020 presidential election underscores the likelihood that the 2024 race for the White House will again divide the country closely and bitterly.

    Yet the undertow threatening Democrats now previews the difficulty they will face in two years if economic conditions don’t improve. In presidential races, political scientists say voters start to harden their verdicts on the economy about a year before Election Day. That means Biden is running out of time to tame inflation, especially if, as most economists expect, doing so will require at least a modest recession. Even amid widespread anxiety about both inflation and recession, Democrats remain competitive this fall by highlighting doubts about Republicans, particularly among the voters in their own coalition. But that cannot be an experiment any Democrat would look forward to repeating in 2024.

    Ronald Brownstein

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