For the most part, there’s very little danger from the animal kingdom in Japan. Even hiking in the mountains far from civilization, bears are rare and wolves are non-existent. Sure, the poisonous fugu blowfish can kill you, but it only poses a threat if you’re too stingy to eat it at a restaurant and insist on catching and cleaning one yourself without the proper know-how.

The are a couple of animal annoyances though, such as massive, territorial crows that claim suburban trash pickup sites like street gangs, plus schools of jellyfish that don’t have the courtesy to wait for summer to be completely over before showing up to ruin the fun of playing in the surf. By far the worst offenders though are the mosquitoes that are prevalent during the warmest months of the year.

But this year we’ve got a secret weapon to deal with the itchiness of the inevitable mosquito bite, and we bet you’ve got one in your kitchen already, too.

It turns out there’s a way to stop a mosquito bite’s itching using just an ordinary metal spoon.

▼ Spoon has always been there to help us out of a jam. Not like Fork and Knife who stopped coming by to hang out the minute our plasma screen broke

First, heat the spoon with hot water. There’s no need to boil it, the temperature it comes out of your kitchen tap at is fine. Next, press the heated spoon against your skin where you were bitten and leave it there for a few minutes. When you pull the spoon away, the itchiness should be gone.

▼ The most amazing thing done with the utensil since spoon bending?

There’s no black magic or psychic power at work here. When a mosquito bites a person, it injects a protein under the skin as it draws blood. This protein is what causes the skin irritation, but the heat from the metal spoon is effective in breaking it down, thus soothing the skin.

Unfortunately, the welt from the bite will still be visible for a few days, but as long as it doesn’t itch, you won’t catch us complaining. It’s been a fairly dry summer in Japan so far, so the mosquitoes aren’t out in force yet, but when they do come, we’ll be ready for them with a whole drawer of spoons.

Now, if someone would just develop a way to take care of jellyfish stings using an empty beer mug, we’ll be all set.

Source: Lifehacker