 It's hard to believe, but malaria still claims over a million lives around the globe every year. In fact, more than half the world's population lives in areas with active malaria transmission, and with no vaccine, the problem is getting worse. The disease is spread by certain types of mosquitoes known in the scientific world as anopheles. Rice fields, of which there are over 500,000 acres in California's Sacramento Valley, serve as ideal breeding grounds for these insects. Although malaria is not prevalent here, the mosquitoes are, so it's a good study site. Using scanners aboard satellites and aircraft such as the U-2, scientists like Byron Wood at NASA's Ames Research Center are producing and analyzing imagery of the valley, which might help make malaria control more manageable. The black blocks here are flooded rice fields before the plants have emerged. By looking at how the rice shown in red develops in these fields, Wood and his colleagues predict which are likely to produce the most mosquitoes. Information like this would help organizations such as the Sutter Yuba Mosquito Control District, whose job it is to limit populations of the insects. They now have to trudge through thousands of acres of flooded rice fields every year, looking for mosquito larvae. Counting the tiny, squiggly larvae makes it possible to spray only in fields where it's absolutely necessary, an important concern economically and environmentally. But the counting process is so labor-intensive it's virtually impossible in parts of the world with far more rice fields, and wouldn't have to be done at all if mosquito concentrations could be determined from a single image. Under Dr. Bob Waschino's direction, scientists from the University of California, Davis, work with the Sutter Yuba District to check the accuracy of NASA's imagery. In addition to counting larvae, they determine the ages of adult mosquitoes in the area by removing and examining female ovaries. There should be very few young adults where low larvae counts were predicted, and so far NASA researchers have been right 80% of the time. UC Davis researchers are also working on a fungus as an alternative to chemicals currently used in mosquito control. This fungus produces spores that attack only mosquito larvae. Nothing else in the environment is affected, and since it continues to work in the fields, months, and possibly years after a single application, it could prove more cost-effective as well. The task now is to get the fungus and imaging techniques to countries that need them most. Malaria control, bringing NASA technology, university expertise, and public agency experience to bear on a serious world health problem.