Research involving honeybee stings on 25 body parts, emperor who fathered 888

And that a chicken with a weight attached to its rear walks like a dinosaur.

This research that has, erm, shaken the world of science was enough for the team to bag themselves an Ig Nobel Prize for diagnostic medicine.

The physics prize went to a team who figured out that every mammal takes around 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds) to empty their bladders.

Among the many though, one of the most scientifically significant research consisted in one research team’s ability to “unboil” an egg, which could prove incredibly useful in cancer research due to the proof that proteins can be “unbound”. It is also excellent trivia to wow guests at dinner parties.

The Ig Nobel for physiology and entomology was shared by Smith and an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona Justin Schmidt, who devised a pain scale for insect stings. It’s painful. Getting stung on the nose is a whole body experience. “As if a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm”.

But although Smith, from Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, carefully arranged for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body to learn about pain, he ended up sharing the gong with another researcher. His conclusion? The most painful places to be stung are the penis shaft, the nostril and the upper lip.

When it comes to science, it helps to be a little bit mad.

To keep the prize winners from losing the run of themselves on the podium during an acceptance speech, the editors bring in an eight-year-old girl to oversee the ceremony.

The chickens naturally changed their centre of gravity and adopted more dinosaur-like posture. Their research saw them triumph in the Chemistry category and offers hope to those who boil eggs unintentionally.

It sounds like the Maths prize winners should have picked up the History prize too as Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer tried to “use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children”.

The scientists worked out that it was theoretically possible, if the leader had sex once a day for 32 years without a break.

The Medicine Prize was apparently awarded for “experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities)” and the Economics Prize went to the Bangkok Metropolitan Police for “for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes”. And to think that all this time we’ve been taking pills and applying creams.

Mark Dingemanse and two colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, took the laurels in the area of literature, discovering that the word “huh” appears to exist in every language of the world. Dingemanse studied all known human languages and determined that all use the word Huh?

“Sometimes these insane things provide a lot of insight”, said Schmidt, the bug guy.