Close up image of a caretaker helping older woman walk

People often fail to notice mosquito bites. Yet hypodermic needle injections generally cause a sharp pain. This oddity was not lost on Japanese researchers at Kansai University in Osaka. They recently created silicon needles that imitate the structure of a mosquito’s proboscis. The new needles work by breaking the skin in the same sequence as mosquito bites. The researchers’ goal is to create needles that don’t hurt so much when they penetrate human skin.