Matt Kaplan
speaker
87 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 16 Jun
Matt Kaplan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Intelligence from The Economist · Local, an aesthetic: the deglobalisation of fun · 16 Jun 2026
podcast
DEET is supposed to be the gold standard repellent against mosquitoes.
Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for The Economist.
And researchers are working out that mosquitoes not only can learn to resist DEET, but actually come to finding it attractive.
So what kind of research are we talking about that has borne this out?
The stuff we're talking about is research done by Claudio Lazari, where he ran an experiment with mosquitoes, a lot like the research that we know Ivan Pavlov did with dogs.
He would make a noise and feed the dogs.
And then eventually he just made the noise and studied what the dogs did.
The answer is when you ring a bell and feed dogs, and then you ring a bell and don't feed dogs, the dogs come to learn that the
The bell means food, and so they salivate when they hear the bell.
It's a conditioning experiment.
And doctor Lazari wanted to know, could you do the same thing with mosquitoes and date the insect repellent?
Okay, so how does the dog
Lazari, instead of ringing a bell and feeding the mosquitoes, he wafted either pure air with no scent in it through the mosquito chamber before giving the mosquitoes either sugar, water, or sheep's blood.
Or he wafted the gentle odor of DEET through the insects' chamber, and then fed them sugar water, or warm sheep's blood.
And after he had done this, he then presented researchers' hands, including his own, with
Two hands in the chamber, one hand coated in Diet and one hand with nothing on it.
And to his dismay, sixty percent of the mosquitoes that had been conditioned with the gentle waft of Diet through their chamber looked at Lazari and his colleagues' hands, and when they had Diet on them, they flew directly at them to go and get a blood meal.
Because the mosquitoes were in an enclosure that had deet present in it and food, they started to associate the smell of deet with food.
And therefore, when they were presented with a hand that had deet on it versus a hand that didn't, they had started to view the deet smell on the hand as the same as a dinner bell.
They smelled the deet and went, okay, I may not like that smell very much, but
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