Don't Bite Me!

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I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Do you consider yourself a particularly smelly person, Dara?

I wash.

Is that where you're asking?

I'm sorry.

I'm with the other side of a table here.

Is that obvious?

I didn't mean to other humans.

Oh, okay i meant i meant to insects oh any specific insects mosquitoes right well look

mosquitoes are the bane of my life in the sense that like no matter how nice the holiday is and how fantastic the place is there is a point after a certain number of days where i go i'd like to go home now please because i'm just over the itching

absolutely over the itching of it all you get do you get that well i think that like you i smell like a delicious tiramousu yeah steak dinner

exactly Wafting along to a mosquito.

I have discovered over the years, this is not what this program is about, but ways to deal with the bites.

Burn them.

Oh, I've gone ice them.

Shock them, do you?

Ice them, yeah.

The thing that I found,

and don't take my medical advice, I'm not that kind of doctor.

No.

There's a little thing that you can buy that gives them an electric shock.

Yes, I remember that, yeah.

Oh.

That works for you, does that?

That works for me.

Little zapper thing.

Once on a comic relief trip, one got into my shirt overnight.

And do you know the thing when you wake up and there's like you can follow its path yeah across my chest and around to my back like whatever I think it was 143 good lord yeah there was um there was one occasion when I was uh I was away I just started dating somebody this is a few years ago and I just

I was away and I got a mosquito bite on my cheek right and it as it usually does with me swelled up massively like the size of a C D on my face

and then I called him was like oh you know I can't I can't see you because I've got quite a big mosquito bite I really really, he was like, no, no, no, no, no, don't worry, it doesn't matter what you look like.

You come here, you honestly, it doesn't matter.

You should definitely come.

And then I found myself on his doorstep, rang the doorbell, open the door, and he was like, you definitely should not have come.

At least that's honest.

Oh, no, no.

You really

do look horrifying.

Should we listen to the questions?

Yeah, okay.

Hi, I'm Ailsa.

I want to ask: why

or why do I get bitten by mosquitoes and midges wherever they are and my husband doesn't get bitten at all.

I'm not convinced that I don't actually get bitten by mosquitoes but they seem to go for pails first that's why I always take her on holiday with me.

So as soon as we're in the vicinity of mosquitoes I think they must know that I'm there and they just go

straight towards me.

I can get bitten multiple times.

I get bitten on the ankles and the eyes and the legs and the arms.

I wouldn't even mind donating a bit of blood, but they then leave something in me that makes me itch like crazy.

I think Elsa's just a bit juicier.

It must be something to do with her blood that attracts them or the smell of the pheromones.

I reckon that I'm just tasty and Keith is a little bit hairier than me, so maybe they can't get through the jungle of hair to bite him.

It is notable that these people are Scottish and midges in Scotland are amongst the most demonic of these creatures.

There was a survey of people going, would you come back to Scotland on holiday?

Scotland's an incredibly beautiful country.

There's lots of really amazing things.

And like 48% said no, midges.

Yeah, because they got bitten.

You know, they go off salmon fishing or something and they have to do it in a net.

Have you ever seen that?

People in Scotland wearing like veils, like bridal veils, while fishing on a loch somewhere.

Beautiful.

It's a weird scenario.

What I want to see is a wedding in that scenario

with an actual bride on the wedding.

You may kiss the bride.

No, no, it's okay, fine.

We'll wait.

We'll We'll wait till we endure it.

Wait till it's a wrong.

Come on under my net.

Yeah.

So it's about attractiveness.

Are we taking a look at how attractive you are?

Yeah, how much of a steak dinner are you to mosquitoes?

Well, here to help us get to the bottom of this animal attraction, our Professor Leslie Voshol from Rockefeller University in the US studies why some of us are mosquito magnets.

And we are also joined by Professor John Pickett from Cardiff University, who is particularly interested in why some of us aren't.

Leslie, let's start with you.

Firstly, how many different types of mosquitoes are there and how many actually bite?

There are a thousand species of mosquitoes.

Some of them feed on blood, some of them do not.

A very small number of species specialize on people and they are the ones who pester us.

But it is a minority of mosquitoes who pester and feed on the blood of humans.

Hashtag not all mosquitoes.

Yeah.

Not all mosquitoes.

Don't be mad at all mosquitoes.

Okay, I don't want to misrepresent mosquitoes because I know they're a powerful lobby.

There's some very sweet and beautiful vegan mosquitoes who do not want to kill us.

But nonetheless, you did say sentence like true, the words, feed on our blood.

And specifically, there is something in blood that they need.

So there's vegan mosquitoes who get everything they need from plants, but the blood-feeding mosquitoes have figured out how to get a giant protein-rich meal, mostly from humans, and they need that to make eggs.

Is it just the girls then?

It is just the girls then.

This is a female problem.

So when you smack that mosquito on your arm, please use the correct gender.

So she is a she

Because she needs that blood to make eggs.

So if female mosquitoes stop biting us today, that would be the end of malaria.

It would be the end of...

dengue and all the arborviruses and it would be the end of mosquitoes.

So it's the need for the blood that is everything.

And what is it within our blood that's so useful for them?

Again, it's proteins, though.

They chew those proteins into individual amino acids and then pump that into the ovaries to be able to make eggs.

I mean, this is honestly changing my view.

If this is now just like girls going through PMT, right?

Gorging on ice cream.

Oh, man.

They're no sympathetic to you.

Suddenly, I have had it.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Yeah, it's true.

We shouldn't be mad.

They're being good moms.

They want to provision their offspring with the biggest meal possible.

So we should not be angry with them.

And how much blood will one buy take from us?

In the lab, it's about two microliters, which is not an amount that your readers care about, but think about doubling their body weight.

So females in the lab double their body weight.

So I'm a big girl.

I'm 160 pounds.

So I would be twice that if I were a female mosquito.

It's an enormous, enormous meal.

That's a lot of ice cream.

It is.

Yes.

But we should not register that.

They're not going to bleed us dry, mosquitoes.

So it's just the reaction we have to it is a problem.

That is correct.

Okay, I would happily donate that amount of blood.

Could you not just sort of leave some out in a tray overnight?

You know, but they really, they love everything about humans.

So it's not going to be as alluring an experience to them.

So, they need the blood to be warm, they need to be attracted.

They like the feeling of piercing skin.

Okay, my sympathy is gone.

Yeah, yeah.

If we just put out buckets of blood, they don't like it nearly as much as if we, even if we put some artificial membrane, they really like that piercing feeling.

And the action of piercing, do they put anticoagulants in?

What effect are they having independent of the blood?

Just like when we eat like a steak, we use saliva as part of the process.

So, so females inject a lot of mosquito saliva under the skin, and that has a couple of purposes.

One is a local anesthetic so that we do not feel the bite until after they've left.

And the second is that it does sort of tenderize things, and that's where you get the immune reaction, the itchiness and the swelling.

And also, presumably, if they've managed to invent a local anesthetic, they've also invented a very good syringe or like a very good hypodermic needle.

Yeah, and it's one of the most beautiful structures in biology.

It's like a flexible structure that can go under the skin and look for a capillary.

With like sort of laser focus, find the capillary.

With a bevel tip, pierce the capillary, and then the pump gets activated and then the blood is drawn into the mid-gut of the animal.

It's amazing.

Can I say, by the way, one of the joys about doing the show is you meet people who study insects or animals or functions of nature that the rest of us have just casually dismissed.

And they describe them as things of great beauty.

They clearly are.

I'm delighted I've given my life to studying these animals.

They are incredible.

And you're painting a picture of a very, very evolved creature.

Okay, they're terrible and they're beautiful.

They are so beautiful.

It's like a three-dimensional chess game and they are 50,000 steps ahead of us.

Everything about them is perfectly designed to get our blood.

And just to get back to the initial question that was asked, different people react in different ways to those bites?

Yeah.

So we, in our early days of recruiting, hundreds of people thought we would do this smart thing and ask people, are you a mosquito magnet or are you not?

And it ends up being completely useless because there's a big difference in how people react to bites.

So, some people react very, very strongly and they always think that they are victims and they are mosquito magnets.

But there is no correlation between how attractive you are and how strongly you react.

So, everybody in my lab is bitten all the time.

So, we're very tolerized.

We can get a couple hundred bites on our arm and then an hour later forget that we have been bitten.

Whereas a regular human being being bitten will have itchy bites for would stay up for a week scratching.

What you're saying here then does imply that some people are more attracted to mosquitoes.

So what is it?

Do you know what it is that makes people more attractive?

Our most attractive person is more than 100 times more attractive to mosquitoes than our least attractive person.

Why?

I think it's still a mystery.

We did some work a few years ago to show that the more carboxylic acids that you have on your skin, the more likely you are to be a mosquito magnet.

But we know that it is not the only factor.

Okay, I want you to talk me through just the process of choosing a victim.

So how does it actually work?

You said these are really, really highly tuned creatures.

Humans, like all animals, give off carbon dioxide.

So carbon dioxide activates mosquitoes, but that is not a signal of a human.

They are attracted to heat, but that is not enough to tell them that it is a human.

So it is the body odor that differentiates human from non-human animals.

And then also the individual odor of different people can make someone a hundred times more attractive hold on though they haven't got noses these are flying syringes that are out to get our blood they are so sophisticated they have antennae that are full of neurons so nerve cells that are attuned to the smell of humans then they have these things called maxillary palps also full of neurons that sense also carbon dioxide because they love our breath and then the mouth parts like the tongue equivalent also can smell us so it's kind of psychedelic, like if your tongue could smell.

So their whole head is covered with nerve cells that are very acutely tuned to the smell of humans.

And again, it's not like underarm body odor if you exercise too much or like the...

the smells of your anogenital regions really it's just like the odor of the skin that we as humans may not even be aware of and that stuff you can't cover with deodorant you can't cover it with perfume it's just this pervasive sort of general smell of human skin that again is not that body odor.

It's not that you can shower, wash, soap up, whatever, to become invisible to mosquitoes.

Yeah, no, no.

I mean, when we collected scent for our study, we had people scrub their arms with hot water and soap just to have a baseline.

Then they would wear nylon fabric on their arms, and there was enough in that nylon to attract a very large number of mosquitoes.

So there's just something on our skin, again, that if you were to go around the studio and smell other people's arms, you wouldn't find it offensive.

But the mosquitoes are incredibly sensitive to it.

Okay, not to play God here, but can you not just like genetically engineer them to knock out this ability?

Oh, yes.

And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested heavily 14 years ago for scientists to do this.

And so we systematically spent their money to make mutant mosquitoes that could not smell people.

And so we had our great idea to knock out a gene called Orco.

And then we put them in a cage and they had no problem finding people and biting them.

Then we knocked out the carbon dioxide receptor and those mutants had no problems finding a person.

Then we knocked out a bunch of other genes and they have no problems.

And so again, three-dimensional chess game, mosquitoes are 50,000 steps ahead of us.

They have built in multiple layers of backup plans.

I'm not giving you a message of hope here today.

It is a depressing message.

I just don't even know how we're going to stop them because they're always just 50,000 steps ahead of us.

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What about what you eat and drink?

I mean, this does particularly strike me as being bad on holiday, which might be because I'm in a sunny climate where mosquitoes are more prevalent, but it also might be because I drink more beer.

Yeah, so there's one really, really great paper on beer that shows very compelling evidence that the same person who drinks a pint of water versus the same person drinking a pint of beer is a much more attractive after they've consumed a pint of beer.

Now why that is, would you have the same effect if you had a single malt whiskey?

Is it the alcohol?

Is it the beer?

Is it the person's behavior if they've had a beer?

So it's sort of unresolved.

But clearly, if you want to attract mosquitoes, drink a pint of beer.

I mean, it just feels like they've increased their powers due to a general ruining every part of the holiday.

Exactly, because you want to be outside drinking beer in a bikini or whatever.

And so they are the same.

That is my dream holiday.

You know, if I could be free to be out there in a bikini, that'd be wonderful.

Yeah, and they're with you.

Okay, well, I think we all want to rid our minds of that image.

So we've actually decided to put some of these mosquito theories to the test.

And what we have done is a little experiment for you where last week Dara and I wore...

what would you call them?

Pantyhose?

I call them little footsie socks, tiny bits of tights.

And they look so good with your bikini.

And then we sent them off to Professor Sarah Reese from Edinburgh University, who studies malaria in mosquitoes.

Sarah, what did did you do with that disgusting package?

Okay, well, it's one of the most exciting experiments we've done because the results were remarkably clear.

One of you, and I don't know who, is doubly attractive to mosquitoes than the other one of you.

Whoa,

okay.

Yeah, let me talk you through what we did.

So we did two kinds of experiments and I'll start with the most exciting one first.

So we took your socks and we put each of your socks over a little heat pad and we put them on top of a cage of mosquitoes.

And so the purpose of the heat pad is just to show the mosquitoes oh look there's a a warm-blooded human somewhere around here we should go and hunt it down and so because we put both of your socks on each side of the cage they could choose whose smells they'd be more attracted to so we put a camera in the bottom of the mosquito cage here and there's about 20 mosquitoes in this cage i should say we've replicated it about six times because you know one should replicate your experiments even though you're only a sample size of of two if we look at person A so can you see all these little mosquitoes there's quite a few of them having a go at that sock certainly are oh my god yeah that is an attractive sock to a mosquito there's loads of them around and they're really quite persistent they're really trying hard to stick their proboscis into that sock and get some blood but person b not nearly as many mosquitoes pathetic nothing no they don't care

this is absolutely they're not persisting there in fact lots of them are giving up you know perhaps regretting their decision to have a look at B and they're going off to person A.

Do you think they've generally shopped around a bit?

They may have, you know, had a little sniff of person B and then got back to person A?

They absolutely made a decision to go to person A and almost twice as many went to person A across all of our trials.

So person A has attracted hundreds of mosquitoes compared to person B.

So do you know which one of you is person A?

Yes, we do.

And I would like to reveal that I can add female mosquitoes to my fan base.

Really?

Oh.

Yeah.

So Hang, does this mean that I can't complain?

Yes.

Oh, my God.

Well, you can complain, but only half as much as me.

Sarah, this will only work for you if you are standing next to Hannah when there are mosquitoes around.

Look, I enjoy doing the show with Hannah.

We haven't extended this to...

Let's go on holiday together.

I've heard it's holiday, Tara.

It's not.

It's not.

Yeah, it's quite true.

You don't have to be around me anyway.

Okay.

I mean, I'm sort of relieved that therefore it could be worse for me.

Earlier on, we were talking about the person who's most attractive to mosquitoes could be 100 times more attractive than the person who's least.

If that's a scale, do we know how far along that scale Hannah might be?

So the other thing I can tell you is when we gave the mosquitoes no choice between the two of you, so we gave mosquitoes only person A to see how attractive they were on their own compared to other mosquitoes getting person B.

Actually, there's no difference between the two of you.

So

if you're on your own you're equally fair game we made a lot of effort early on just to distinguish the attractiveness to mosquitoes is the same as smelling bad but I'd like to now call that into question again they know that you're the one that they preferred that I'd like that to be my excuse me Leslie was talking about scrubbing the skin and the scent still being there I'd like to really re-emphasize that

are there certain smells that they they like though Sarah well it might be that actually you both smell kind of the same it's just that Hannah is producing more of those smells.

Oh, no.

It's worse and worse.

The heads keep coming here, don't they?

Sorry, Hannah.

Oh, God.

That's awful.

What kind of smells do they like?

It's definitely Tiramisu.

Okay, let's move on.

Because I heard they like cheese.

You like the smell of cheese?

Is that one nice?

Sarah, you dare sign for darlings.

Okay, I'm going to try and tread very carefully here.

I'm not casting any aspersions about your dietary or your washing habits here at all.

At all.

So, I mean, there have been a few studies that have shown that this particular kind of cheese made in Belgium, Limburger cheese, the bacteria that are used to ripen that cheese produce these carboxylic acid compounds that Leslie mentioned.

And those compounds and those bacteria are pretty similar to some of the bacteria that we do.

Naturally, I will stress the word naturally find on our feet.

So it is possible that, you know, because we did the experiment on your foot smells, that perhaps what we're seeing is a differential vigorousness of your feet bacteria.

Okay, guys, I think this is very harsh.

I have extremely good hiding habits.

I wash my socks up to four times a month, okay?

And if anyone has anything to say about that,

I personally think I prefer the implication not that you smell of cheese, but you smell the bacteria used to ripen cheese.

I think the curious case here, Dara, is that in fact it's the other way round.

So if you actually just look at the smell and take away the contact, all people have attractants, but some have some extra chemistry which tells the mosquito that it may not be a good target for a blood meal.

And those chemicals are what we call contextual repellents.

So in the context of the human attractiveness, if you've got heightened levels or the presence of these chemicals, then we get a substantially reduced attractiveness.

And certainly, there are people that they are completely unattractive to mosquitoes.

Scottish biting midge will even fly by them to get to somebody who is attractive.

So, this isn't that I stink it, that Dara's unattractive.

Yes, hang on, hang on.

I mean, this is flipping so fast at this stage.

People need the clarity on this.

I know there's a lot of discussion about the science of mosquitoes here, but we really want to work out who smells more.

And we're way off.

Hannah smells attractively versus I smell unattractively, and which is a better or worse skill to have?

Well it depends whether we can use the chemicals that are causing that unattractiveness.

That's the problem.

And it's two compounds made by our skin that we call terpenoids.

And when they are oxidised, which can happen during stress,

these compounds are formed and can indicate stress.

And we think it's that that the mosquito is averse to.

But really some of the people that have got high levels of these compounds smell, I'm sure, just like Dara does, absolutely normally.

Absolutely wonderful, I think you want to say.

It's not just normal, but gently warm, a musky sense of home.

And I smell like relaxed, chill.

I'm just a cool Zen girl.

That's right.

So I possibly excrete terpenoids.

And when I'm stressed, say, for example, you've been asked to wear weird socks that have been sent to a lab, like, and that kind of freaks me out a little bit, that I excrete more of these, but these things actively repel mosquitoes.

Yeah, so some people have got an inherent level which is higher than others of them,

and those are the people who luckily aren't attractive.

These compounds, though, can you not just like manufacture them slav them on yourself?

Oh, yes, yes, that's how we find out that they do this.

Then, okay, why can't I just go and buy this stuff then?

Well, that's a pity, isn't it, that we can't do that at the moment.

But we haven't managed to actually get the idea that this could be an alternative to the kind of repellents that we use and that I use when I go to Africa to work on malaria mosquitoes.

I mean, mosquito bites are annoying and itchy, but we should say the real problem is that some of those mosquitoes can spread very nasty diseases and they are the biggest killer in the animal world.

Absolutely.

And the thing is, from my perspective, we don't need to worry so much about mosquitoes, but it's the things that are inside them, those viruses and those parasites that they're transmitting from person to person.

And so that's actually what we want to target.

I mean, a few hundred million cases of malaria exist every year.

It kills children under five.

You know, up to 40% of the world's population do live in areas where there are malaria mosquitoes present.

Is there anything within the parasite itself, you know, that makes it so good at spreading this disease?

Well, the parasites also want the lipids, the fats and the proteins.

So all the goodness that's in that blood, just like the mosquitoes do.

And the parasites are competing with the mosquitoes for that foodstuff.

Because the malaria parasites do a lot of bizarrely complicated development and replication when they're living inside a mosquito.

It actually takes malaria parasites two weeks to get from entering in a mosquito to being ready to exit that mosquito and enter a new person.

And that, you know, is beyond the lifespan of the vast majority of mosquitoes in the wild.

So it's kind of crazy in a way that malaria is such a problem.

How does it work then?

If that sort of feels like a conundrum.

If you're a parasite and you need to spend two weeks living inside a mosquito that is unlikely to make it for that length of time.

Your best interests is in keeping your mosquito safe.

So you don't want to cause it to get too ill.

You don't want to cause it to do too many risk-taking behaviours like getting more blood, where they're quite likely to get swatted and squashed and killed.

So there has been some ideas that, well, maybe malaria parasites actually make their mosquitoes live a very quiet life for those two weeks, only feeding on sugar until they're ready to be transmitted back to a person.

And then they make their mosquito very hungry and very keen for blood but again jury's really out as to whether this could be a real phenomenon i mean mosquitoes don't appreciate having malaria it doesn't make them very sick but it's not great either so they maybe live a quiet life simply because they're a little bit ill mosquitoes tend to bite at night right so can you just if you really want to try and avoid them just be extremely careful at night time and then and then be more free during the day that's what you would hope for isn't it so we've been using bed nets for decades uh which stop mosquitoes biting people when they're sleeping during the night time.

Those bed nets are often treated with insecticide chemicals.

So not only do they stop the mosquito from getting any blood, but they also poison the mosquito to death.

But this is clearly a massive problem if you're a mosquito.

So what's the solution?

Evolution generally finds a way and the solution mosquitoes have found, which relates to the multiple layers of backup plans that Leslie mentioned, is to bite people earlier in the evening and later in the morning when they're not protected by bed nets.

There's even some suggestions that some mosquitoes are camping out outside schools and biting children when they arrive to start their school day, which is pretty terrifying.

It is absolutely terrifying and thank you Sarah for raising this point that the mosquitoes say like haha you're all like sleeping under these nets where we can't get at you and so slowly the population moves toward day biting is terrifying because they realize we are not going to walk around wearing bed nets as we go about our day.

Leslie, that idea of hanging around outside schools to get children as they leave during the daytime, I mean, that sounds pretty aggressive.

Does their behavior change if they have dengue or malaria?

They are super aggressive biters.

I think that the evidence for dengue is a little bit more convincing on both sides, that dengue-infected mosquitoes may be more aggressive, more restless, take more bites.

And there is one paper that says that humans smell different when they're infected with dengue and are more attractive but there's only a very small number of papers and so more work is needed to really figure out which side is correct.

The day biting behavior is what we call behavioral plasticity.

So they're hungry because they're not getting blood when they want it and so they're just changing their behavior to try out something new that will happen to be successful.

But one of the the kind of the knock-on consequences of that is, well, what does that mean for malaria transmission?

Which brings it back to what do we really care about dealing with here?

And it's the disease transmission.

So we don't really know what ending up in a mosquito at a weird time of day means for either party.

You know, we feel rubbish if we eat a massive meal just before we go to bed or immediately if we wake up.

The same is going to be true for mosquitoes as well.

Taking a huge blood meal, which is kind of like drinking a bath of soup if you're a human, and doing that at a strange time of day when our circadian clocks aren't expecting it, isn't going to be so good for our health.

Better than starving, but not great.

Same is probably true for the parasites, except we've shown that mosquitoes are more susceptible to getting malaria infection when they take blood meals in the daytime than the nighttime.

I'll be honest with you, listening to all three of you, it sounds like you are battling these mortal enemies that you despise and adore in equal measure.

Maybe deeply respect.

Yeah, that might be a way of putting it.

Yeah, I mean,

if we are going to respect.

It's fair to say that these creatures have been ridiculously underestimated by both science and by medicine.

They're far more sophisticated than we've given them credit for.

And evolution always will find a way.

The best we can do is to win some of the battles in this long war.

So we need to both be dealing with the parasites, but as well trying to deal with mosquitoes locally where we can too will be a good idea.

Well look, the best of luck with that battle.

I can see why Hannah would be the high value target in this ongoing ongoing war.

But thank you all for your efforts and thank you for coming in and talking to us today.

Professor Leslie Voshol, Professor John Piggett, and Professor Sarah Reese.

Who smells more?

And for what reason?

That was left tantalizingly vague.

Wasn't it just?

Yeah.

And luckily, this being radio, no one will be able to tell the truth.

I think they'll guess.

They'll definitely guess.

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Nature Bang.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Nature Bang.

I'm Becky Ripley, I'm Emily Knight.

And in this series from BBC Radio 4, we look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions.

Like, how can a brainless slime mold help us solve complex mapping problems?

And what can an octopus teach us about the relationship between mind and body?

It really stretches your understanding of consciousness.

With the help of evolutionary biologists.

I'm actually always very comfortable comparing us to other species.

Philosophers.

You never really know what it could be like to be another creature.

And spongologists.

Is that your job title?

Are you a spongologist?

Well, I am in certain spheres.

It's science meets storytelling.

With a philosophical twist.

It really gets to the heart of free will and what it means to be you.

So if you want to find out more about yourself via cockatoos that dance, frogs that freeze, and single-cell amoebas that design border policies, subscribe to Nature Bang from BBC Radio 4, available on BBC Sounds.

At Coldwater Creek, we take a thoughtful approach to design, giving attention to what matters most to you.

From quality fabrics to the fits you love, to artful details that captivate.

Coldwater Creek caters to your wardrobe in every season, for every occasion, and in every size.

We create comfortable, confident styles with endless versatility that reflect the life you live.

Discover why Coldwater Creek is the sought-after choice in women's clothing.

For new seasonal looks, shopcoldwatercreek.com.

Is your cash working hard for you right until the very moment you need it?

It could be if it was in a Wealthfront cash account.

With WealthFront, you can earn 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks until you're ready to invest, nearly 10 times the national average.

And you get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts 24-7, 365.

4% APY is not a promotional rate, and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn.

And it takes just minutes to transfer your cash to any of Wealthfront's expert-built investing accounts when you're ready.

Wealthfront, money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start saving and investing today.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

The national average interest rate for savings accounts is posted on FDIC.gov as of December 16, 2024.

Go to wealthrund.com to start today.