Researchers have discovered nerve cells that are crucial for sensing itchiness — but are not needed to detect pain. It might seem obvious that an itch and a pain are different sensations — that itch you want to scratch feels quite different from being stabbed — but neuroscientists have long puzzled over how the nervous system teases them apart. When neuroscientist Zhou-Feng Chen and his colleagues at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, destroyed a particular set of neurons. (source: nature.com)
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