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“Saturday Night Live” writer and cast member Jack Handy, wrote “Probably the saddest thing you’ll ever see is a mosquito sucking on a mummy.”

I suspect it’s sadder seeing mosquitoes sucking on me, though our cold, windy summer has kept the mosquito population down.

Now, mosquito snouts are the model for painless hypodermic needles. An article on technology.newscientist.com by Belle Dume tells how Indian and Japanese engineers have developed a microneedle that uses a tiny microelectromechanical pump, mimicking the mosquito’s flexing and relaxing motion of its proboscis to create negative pressure and facilitate blood-sucking.  Mosquito bites don’t hurt, but their nasty anticoagulant saliva does. The new needle’s diameter is 60 microns, with a micron equaling 0.000039 of an inch. By comparison, the period ending this sentence is about 397 microns, a postage stamp is 25,000 microns long and a normal syringe needle is 900 microns. Ouch.

Other surprising medical news came from the MSN Health and Fitness Web site where I read how “brain freeze” from eating too much ice cream can be countered by pushing as much of your tongue as possible against the roof of your mouth. This reduces the oral chill that makes your body think its brain is freezing. Your body overheats the brain to compensate, and this heating causes the headache.

MSN also mentioned Dr. Scott Schaffer, a throat specialist, who recommends curing throat tickles by scratching your ear. “When the nerves in your ear are stimulated, it creates a reflex in the throat that can cause a muscle spasm. This spasm relieves the tickle.”

These suggestions pale next to how apple pie can significantly lower your blood sugar and cholesterol. The pie itself doesn’t pull this off; it’s one of its contents — cinnamon — that’s the marvel.

U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists studying how various common foods affect blood sugar levels were startled to find that apple pie, “super-sugary but laced with cinnamon,” reduced blood sugars. Studies have found that a daily half-teaspoon of cinnamon lowers sugar levels 18-29 percent, and the effects linger 20 days after the cinnamon dosage was suspended.

A USDA researcher said, “I don’t know of any drug or product whose effects persist for 20 days.”

Cinnamon’s effects are verified by powerful online medical databases the library subscribes to which can be used at home and work, including Consumer Health Complete. CHC provides instant access to a bevy of medical reference books, thousands of major health reports, more than 700 physician-generated videos and hundreds of periodicals and pamphlets.

One of these is the Tufts University Health and Nutrition Letter from 2005 that describes how Dr. Andrew Greenberg found that a one-fourth teaspoon of cinnamon twice a day “significantly lowered the subjects’ blood sugar, triglycerides, LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol.”  Don Graves, another researcher from UC Santa Barbara, says that biochecmically, cinnamon “does much the same thing as insulin” by “making cells more sensitive to the insulin that is available.”

Doctors warn diabetics not to replace their medication with cinnamon. Testing is still underway, and while it’s uncertain how much cinnamon is toxic, cinnamon contains coumarin, which produces the new-mown hay smell of cut grass. Coumarin is used in tobacco, perfumes, artificial vanilla and as “a potent rodenticide,” since rats can’t metabolize it very well. It also is used in medicine as a blood thinner and has anti-fungicidal and anti-tumor properties, according to www.phytochemicals.info.

Not all cinnamon is the same. In fact, most cinnamon found in the U.S. stores is really cassia, a botanical relative found in China, Indonesia and Vietnam. “True cinnamon” comes from evergreen trees in Sri Lanka and is more delicate than cassia, which is coarser and more pungent.

Cassia sticks are tough, single peels of thick loosely curled bark, while “true cinnamon” sticks have many thin tightly coiled layers.  “Saigon cinnamon” from Vietnam has 25 percent more cinnamaldehyde than other cassia varieties or “true cinnamon,” which contains only 4 percent. I discovered it at the best spice shop going, Buck’s Fifth Avenue in Olympia, Wash., (www.culinaryexotica.com/), which offers mail service.

Cinnamon is now part of my daily oatmeal regime that keeps my blood happy, particularly since I learned that cinnamon repels insects.

And as Benito Mussolini noted, “The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.”