Word: cords
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...stage in an assortment of absurdist masks and costumes. One guy clinging to a pole is wrapped up in duct tape; another wrestles naked inside a sheet of translucent plastic; then there's the vaguely threatening shirtless clown, who wanders about tangled in an extension cord, with an iron dragging at the end of it. (See TIME's top 10 theater productions...
...neuroscientists led by Glenn Giesler at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, hypothesized that the mechanism by which scratching relieves an itch takes place not along the nerve fibers of itchy skin but deep within the central nervous system - specifically, in the spinothalamic tract (STT) neurons in the spinal cord, which transmit information about pain, temperature and touch to the brain. (Previous studies have shown that STT neurons can be activated with the application of an itch-producing chemical like histamine and that the neurons send that itch sensation to the brain...
...relieve the itch. The findings supported the researchers' initial hunch that the itch sensation was not located along the skin of the monkeys' legs where histamine had been injected and that relief did not occur where the metal claw was scratching. Rather, both sensations were rooted in the spinal cord. (See pictures of an X-ray studio...
...Giesler theorizes that the itch sensation creates an excited state in the STT neurons that scratching inhibits - as if our fingernails were sending a message to spinal-cord neurons to cool off. Scientists are still a long way from understanding the itch-scratch phenomenon, and while Giesler's study gives them a good place to start, neuroscientists caution that in humans, the mysteries of itching and scratching may go beyond the physiological: emotional and psychological factors are also often at play, especially in cases of unexplained, unremitting itching or itching of phantom limbs...
...wasn't. Later that night, Flores hanged himself in his garage with an extension cord. Henderson and her husband Patrick, both Army recruiters, were stunned. "I'll never forget sitting there at Sergeant Flores' memorial service with my husband and seeing his wife crying," Amanda recalls. "I remember looking over at Patrick and going, 'Why did he do this to her? Why did he do this to his children?' " Patrick didn't say anything, and Amanda now says Flores' suicide "triggered" something in her husband. Six weeks later, Patrick hanged himself with a dog chain in their backyard shed...