Shazam…for mosquitoes?
Stanford researchers have developed Abuzz, a cell phone-based monitoring system that identifies a mosquito’s species by the annoying buzz it makes with its wings. The idea is to create a global mosquito map through crowdsourcing. The map would track the spread of mosquito-borne diseases zika and would help guide the deployment of resources to fight them.
Anyone with a phone can record a mosquito’s buzz and submit it to the Abuzz database. The audio is cleaned and put through an algorithm that uses 1,000 hours of captured buzzing to determine the mosquito’s species. So Abuzz is counting on an army of citizen scientists to help gather the data from the billions of mosquitoes we would normally just swat away.
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