News

Istanbul Fights Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes Using A Smartphone App

There are approximately 190,000 mosquito habitats in Istanbul, and 80% of them wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for humans creating ideal breeding conditions.

Published

5 years ago

April 22, 2021

Joanna Melki

istanbul fights disease carrying mosquitoes using a smartphone app

Unsplash

With the world’s attention focused on the still ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it’s easy to forget that there are many other serious health problems affecting the lives of people around the world. Istanbul is one of the countless cities that have been invaded by disease-carrying mosquitoes, and the city’s civic body has recently decided to solve this problem using modern technology.

More specifically, the Istanbul Municipality has released a smartphone app whose purpose is to identify different mosquito species in the city and create a real-time map showing their location. The gathered information will allow city officials to take appropriate actions in order to stop, or at least slow down, the spread of mosquitoes in the city of hundred names.

The biggest challenge is the fact that not all Istanbul residents own high-end smartphones with high-resolution cameras capable of taking detailed pictures of tiny mosquitoes, especially under poor lighting conditions. That said, even less-than-ideal pictures can help officials map out the general presence of mosquitoes in Istanbul, which can go a long way in tackling the infestation.

Önder Yüksel Eryiğit, a senior municipal official, said that there are approximately 190,000 mosquito habitats in Istanbul, and 80 percent of them wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for humans creating ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes.

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Academics have warned the Istanbul Municipality about the possibility of mosquitoes infected with Zika and West Nile viruses already making the city their new home. To prevent a deadly outbreak of these and other infectious diseases, it’s important to act quickly and avoid letting the problem get out of hand.

This certainly isn’t the first application of mobile apps in the Middle East for the purposes of solving pressing healthcare issues, and it’s safe to say that it won’t be the last. For example, during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, a group of 16 technology enthusiasts from Turkey developed a contact-tracing app to instantly alert users who had contact with infected people.

News

Instagram Redraws Its Wordmark And The Internet Reads “Instagzam”

Instagram’s first wordmark refresh in a decade arrives with new fonts, a restrained gradient — and a Reddit verdict of sidegrade.

Published

4 days ago

August 14, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Although Instagram’s famous camera icon hasn’t changed, the company has refreshed the handwritten wordmark at the top of its app. This is the first redesign we’ve seen in ten years, and one the internet promptly set about renaming.

“The wordmark at the top of the app hasn’t changed in 10 years, so it was time for a refresh,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote in a post on August 13, describing the new version as “cleaner and more modern” while keeping references to the original design.

Instagram says its team explored hundreds of options — all-caps lettering, camera-inspired concepts, even literal handwriting — before returning to script. “Script reflects individuality, so referencing that felt right,” Instagram director of product design Jasmine Probst said in Meta’s announcement. “The new wordmark is bolder and simpler, with touches of unexpectedness. It cues individual expression, a personal voice, both of which have always been core to Instagram”.

The wordmark is part of a broader brand overhaul: an updated Instagram Sans typeface, two new fonts — the hand-drawn Instagram Pen and Instagram Mono — plus refreshed motion and layouts, and more restrained use of the signature gradient. The wordmark is rolling out globally now, with the rest arriving throughout 2026 and beyond.

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The design mixes cursive and print lettering, some characters connected and others floating free. That hybrid approach, combined with unusually shaped “s” and “r” characters, led some users to conclude the logo actually reads “Instagzam”. On the r/logodesign subreddit, one user said the wordmark looked “fan-made,” like something built in Canva; another called it “an unsettling mix of manuscript and cursive”; a third summarized it as a “sidegrade” — or, inevitably, a “zidegrade”.

Not everyone was hostile to the new look. Some found the half-cursive design stylish and surprisingly readable, while others called it an improvement on its predecessor, and one commenter argued Instagram was simply adopting minimalist branding later than everyone else. Either way, the platform now has a refreshed identity, three updated fonts, and an unofficial new pronunciation.