Mosquitoes find people through carbon dioxide, body heat and skin chemistry, and some people draw more bites than others. About 80 percent of people carry a gene that makes them secretors, meaning their blood-type antigens appear in saliva and other body fluids. Studies have found that secretors with type O blood attract more landings from Aedes albopictus mosquitoes. Skin bacteria also shape attractiveness: Anopheles females, which carry malaria, respond to the amount and variety of microbes on the skin. Drinking alcohol makes people more attractive to mosquitoes in one study, and dark clothing draws some species more than light colours do.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.