An itch on the tip of your nose can feel different from one on your rear end—and possibly a bit more painful. Why is that? Shouldn’t your body treat an itch like an itch, no matter where it pops up?

According to a new study from North Carolina State University, your body treats itches on your face much differently than it treats them on the rest of your body.

The study found that your body sends itch signals from the face and the rest of the body along different routes to your brain, where they are processed. It’s as if your body has two different “itch phone lines” communicating with the brain—one from the face and another from the rest of the body.

Itches travel to your brain differently throughout the body

An itch on your arm starts with irritation of the skin—perhaps from dryness—then travels through the dorsal root ganglia, the spinal cord, and finally to the brain. An itch on your face goes from the spot of irritation to a different system called the trigeminal ganglia, and then to the brain.

Here’s the straight science:

“You can think of itch being transmitted from the skin to the brain as a series of switches that get flipped,” Santosh Mishra, associate professor of molecular biomedical sciences at NC State, said in a statement. 

“On the body, itch signals go from neuronal projections in the skin through the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) – which are clusters of sensory cells located at the root of the spinal nerves – then to the spinal cord. But on the face and head, those signals travel to the trigeminal ganglia (TG) – which are clusters of sensory cells located in a small structure below the brain where it sits atop the skull,” Mishra added.

Your body sends mixed signals to your face

The researchers also discovered why an itch on your face may feel different from one on your torso. Studies showed that when histamine, an itch-inducing substance, was applied to the neck and cheek, the cheek itched less than the neck. Researchers initially assumed this was because there are fewer nerves in the cheek, but they were wrong: the cheek actually has far more. Instead, the face sends itch and pain signals simultaneously, and pain often overrides the sensation of itching. In the rest of the body, those signals are separated. That’s why an itch on your face feels different and may even be more painful than one on your arm.

Now that we know why an itch on your cheek feels different from one on your stomach, researchers can work on therapies that better address skin irritation on different parts of the body. One day, you may have a separate cream for a facial itch and another for one on your torso—not because of marketing, but because of real science.

“Understanding how itch perception in the face differs from itch perception in the body could give us better molecular targets for future therapies,” Mishra said.

A single door can open up a world of endless possibilities. For homeowners, the front door of their house is a  gateway to financial stability, job security, and better health. Yet for many, that door remains closed. Due to the rising costs of housing, 1 in 3 people around the world wake up without the security of safe, affordable housing. 

Since 1976, Habitat for Humanity has made it their mission to unlock and open the door to opportunity for families everywhere, and their efforts have paid off in a big way. Through their work over the past 50 years, more than 65 million people have gained access to new or improved housing, and the movement continues to gain momentum. Since 2011 alone, Habitat for Humanity has expanded access to affordable housing by a hundredfold. 

A world where everyone has access to a decent home is becoming a reality, but there’s still much to do. As they celebrate 50 years of building, Habitat for Humanity is inviting people of all backgrounds and talents to be part of what comes next through Let’s Open the Door, a global campaign that builds on this momentum and encourages people everywhere to help expand access to safe, affordable housing for those who need it most. Here’s how the foundation to a better world starts with housing, and how everyone can pitch in to make it happen. 

Globally, almost 3 billion people, including 1 in 6 U.S. families, struggle with high costs and other challenges related to housing. A crisis in itself, this also creates larger problems that affect families and communities in unexpected ways. People who lack affordable, stable housing are also more likely to experience financial hardship in other areas of their lives, since a larger share of their income often goes toward rent, utilities, and frequent moves. They are also more likely to experience health problems due to chronic stress or environmental factors, such as mold. Housing insecurity also goes hand-in-hand with unstable employment, since people may need to move further from their jobs or switch jobs altogether to offset the cost of housing. 

Affordable homeownership creates a stable foundation for families to thrive, reducing stress and increasing the likelihood for good health and stable employment. Habitat for Humanity builds and repairs homes with individual families, but it also strengthens entire communities as well. The MicroBuild® Initiative, for example, strengthens communities by increasing access to  loans for low-income families seeking to build or repair their homes. Habitat ReStore locations provide affordable appliances and building materials to local communities, in addition to creating job and volunteer opportunities that support neighborhood growth. 

Everyone can play a part in the fight for housing equity and the pursuit of a better world. Over the past 50 years, Habitat for Humanity has become a leader in global housing thanks to an engaged network of volunteers—but you don’t need to be skilled with a hammer to make a meaningful impact. Building an equitable future means calling on a wide range of people and talents.Here’s how you can get involved in the global housing movement:

Speaking up on social media about the growing housing crisis 

Volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity build in your local community

Travel and build with Habitat in the U.S. or  in one of 60   countries where we work around the globe

Join the Let’s Open the Door movement and, when you donate, you can create your own personalized door 

Shop or donate at your local Habitat ReStore

Every action, big and small, drives a global movement toward a better future. A safe home unlocks opportunity for families and communities alike, but it’s volunteers and other supporters, working together with a shared vision, who can open the door for everyone. 

Visit habitat.org/open-door to learn more and get involved today. 

Which lane do you choose at the grocery store?

To your left, the self-checkout area: a collection of blinking, beeping, whirring, computer-speaking machines with bright LED screens and audible prompts to “please select a payment type.” To your right, a single lane with a human cashier…and a line that snakes into the next aisle and out of sight.

You look down. You have six things; the math is obvious. The kiosks will be faster.

But somehow, you and your little basket find yourselves at the back of that winding line.

What’s going on here? If you have ever steered your cart away from self-checkout, even when it is the faster, more efficient option, you are not alone. It may seem like a simple preference on paper: You’re either a “kiosk person” or a “not-kiosk person.” Optimized or old-school. But for many shoppers, that choice is rooted in a human desire for connection and emotional safety, and a small, stubborn refusal to do more work under cameras.

A ritual quietly disappears

Within a single generation, grocery shopping moved from “you hand your stuff to a person” to “you become the person.” For most of the 20th century, buying groceries meant interacting with at least one other human: You chose the lane, loaded items onto the belt, and handed your entire life—cloves of garlic, wine that costs $2, strawberry ice cream, tissues infused with lotion and  Vicks VapoRub—to another person. They scanned, bagged, and told you, “Have a good night.”

Today, 40% of checkout lanes at major U.S. grocery chains are self-checkout. They are everywhere: In 2026, 96% of grocery stores in the U.S. offered self-checkout technology, while 86% of consumers claim to use it. You scan. You bag. You look up codes for organic green onions. You do all this on camera, with a disembodied voice ready to tell you about an “unexpected item in the bagging area.”

There was a time when a “full-service checkout” meant that someone else—a trained professional—handled everything. They asked about your day, made sure that egg cartons never wound up at the bottom of your bag, and sometimes carried everything out to your car. It felt like being taken care of.

Self-checkout machines didn’t just replace a series of tasks. They erased the human at the end of a grocery trip.

The importance of “weak ties”

So, you avoid self-checkout lines. Psychologists say a few different things are going on here.

Researchers use the term “weak ties” for the small, casual relationships we maintain with people we don’t know well: the kind cashier who always smiles, the guy behind the fish counter who saves his best salmon for you, and the bus driver who recognizes your face even if they don’t know your name.

Brief, ordinary, easy to overlook—and, for many people, irreplaceable. Toni Antonucci, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, explained the significance to the Daily Mail: Weak ties are “somebody who makes you feel important in their world—somebody who makes you feel human.”

When self-checkout replaces the cashier, it eliminates one of the last reliably recurring weak-tie interactions in many people’s daily lives. 

Studies on social connectedness show that these fleeting moments play an important role in our day-to-day lives and measurably improve our mood and sense of belonging, particularly for people who otherwise move through their days in relative isolation.

Imagine the person who works from home or whose apartment falls quiet by 9 a.m. When that cashier remembers something they mentioned weeks ago, they experience the “weak-tie connection.” It’s not friendship. But on certain days, it’s the only exchange that reminds them they exist outside their apartment. It’s a microdose of belonging: proof that they still live in the minds of others.

When habits don’t meet expectations

Researchers who study checkout behavior note that many shoppers—particularly older ones—carry a strong expectation that being served by a person is simply part of what it means to be a customer. It is not entitlement in the pejorative sense. It is a social contract that made sense for decades: You bring items to the cashier, and they handle the transaction. When a kiosk breaks that contract and hands the transaction back to you, it is not just inconvenient; it feels like a small breach in the way the world works.

If you have spent 50 years handing your groceries to a human, your nervous system quietly codes that as “how this is supposed to work.” A touch screen, no matter how “user-friendly,” does not feel like a convenient feature. It makes many older shoppers ask, “Wait, why am I suddenly doing this part myself?”

“These systems aren’t really about innovation or collaboration between companies and consumers,” said Mathieu Lajante, a business management professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. “They’re about maximizing profits while weakening social norms of reciprocity and responsibility.”

Layer tech anxiety on top of that—worrying about “doing it wrong,” getting stuck in the bag selection menu, holding up the line—and the kiosk feels antagonistic. It is an intrusion into a ritual they have followed for decades.

“Am I supposed to be doing this? Really?”

People who do not like self-checkout often hold a strong sense of how labor should work. They remember when a grocery trip included a checker, a bagger, and sometimes even someone who walked your cart out. In their mental contract, paying for groceries includes paying for human help: people who do the things you’re bad at, like the game of Jenga happening in your brown paper bag.

Handing that job to a machine—and, by extension, back to them—can feel like a tiny erosion of what they’re owed as a customer.

When they say, “I’m not doing that—that’s not my job,” it’s not “self-entitlement” or brattiness: it’s a fairness instinct kicking in. They’re refusing to do unpaid work.

All the small stuff in between

Research shows that people who prefer human lanes are often at least partly extroverted: They get energy from small talk, feel safer in familiar social scripts, and like the feeling of being known in their regular spots. Even if they’re shy in other areas of life, the grocery line gives them a structured stage where they know their role and the beats.

And for some, there’s a softer motive: protection. They want to preserve human workers and, by extension, a way of life. They’ve watched their local supermarket cut hours, close lanes, and replace faces with screens. Choosing a cashier feels like a tiny act of solidarity: “If I keep standing here, maybe this job doesn’t disappear as fast.”

3 big reasons you might be right

Then there are the people who see that same setup—self-checkout kiosks to the left, a single checkout lane, and a long line to the right—and make the opposite call.

@idanabada Self checkout store in LAX. The future is here! #ai #lax #store #shopping #cheetos #doritos ♬ original sound – Idan Abada

Self checkout store in LAX. The future is here! #ai #lax #store #shopping #cheetos #doritos

You know them: the person who snakes past the full‑service lanes and beelines for the one open machine. They move at their own pace, bag their groceries the way they like (frozen together, produce on top, no smashed bread), and skip the part where they talk to a stranger. They can buy late‑night junk food, an embarrassing product, or six cans of cat food and wine without bracing for a comment.

“When you’re at a cashier register, the cashier sees everything you purchase. When you’re at self-checkout, you can control what others see, so you might be more likely to buy embarrassing items.” – Becca Taylor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“When you’re at a cashier register, the cashier sees everything you purchase. When you’re at self-checkout, you can control what others see, so you might be more likely to buy embarrassing items.” – Becca Taylor, University of Illinois........

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