You swat. You spray. You light every citronella candle within a five-mile radius, yet somehow the mosquito finds you. It turns out there is a reason why your efforts feel almost pointless. These bugs aren't just sniffing you out; they've been tracking your body heat all this time.
A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara has discovered something that sounds like it belongs in a sci-fi thriller: mosquitoes can sense infrared radiation, essentially the heat signature your body constantly radiates, and use it to hone in on you from across the room. Researchers have for the first time documented infrared detection as a mosquito sense, in a finding detailed in the journal Nature.
