Bee stings,
research that makes you go 'huh?' win Ig Nobels
Associated
Press
BOSTON (AP) — A Cornell University graduate student who allowed
honeybees to sting him in 25 places and a group of scientists who
concluded it's possible for one man to father 888 children are
among the winners of this year's Ig Nobels, which honor humorous
scientific achievement.
Michael Smith estimates he was stung about 200 times during his
2012 honeybee study. His conclusion: The three most painful places
to get stung are the nostril, the upper lip and the male sex
organ.
"A sting to the nostril is so painful it's like a whole body
experience," he said.
Other winners being honored Thursday night at the 25th annual
ceremony at Harvard University include a trio of linguists who
discovered that almost every language in the world uses the word
"huh" for clarification in a conversation and researchers who found
that corporate CEOs take less professional risk if directly
affected by natural disasters as children.
Real Nobel laureates hand out the prizes, and each winner
receives a cash award: a Zimbabwean 10 trillion-dollar bill, the
equivalent of a couple of U.S. dollars.
Smith shared the Ig Nobel for physiology and entomology with
Justin Schmidt, an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona
who devised a pain scale for insect stings.
His advice: Do not get stung by the tarantula hawk, a nasty
looking wasp found in the Southwestern U.S. with a stinger about a
quarter-inch long.
"The sting is entirely nontoxic but hurts like the bejesus,"
Schmidt said.
Mark Dingemanse and two colleagues at the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, won the Ig Nobel
for literature for determining that the word "huh" is used in
languages around the world, including some of the most
obscure.
"A system for fixing misunderstandings is clearly a crucial part
of language," he said. "'Huh?' is one element of this system: It's
the basic error signal people fall back on if all else
fails."
Elisabeth Oberzaucher and a colleague at the University of
Vienna in Austria won the mathematics prize for figuring out
whether it was possible for Moroccan Emperor Moulay Ismael to have
sired 888 children — and that's the conservative
estimate.
Ismael fathered the children during a roughly 30-year reign that
ended in 1727. It sounds exhausting, but the bottom line is, yes,
it is possible to father that many children if he had sex daily.
The study found that it could be done with as few as 65 women, not
the 500 in his harem.
Raghu Rau, professor of finance at the University of Cambridge,
and his colleagues won for their study that found business leaders
more directly affected by natural disasters as children took less
risk during their careers.
Rau uses Apple as an example. Late CEO Steve Jobs, who lived
through a deadly landslide near his home in San Francisco as a
child, ran the company conservatively. His successor, Tim Cook,
witnessed few fatalities despite regular tornadoes while growing up
in Alabama and has made more risky business decisions.
"Think of yourself as a member of a board of directors: When you
try to hire a CEO, do you want a risk taker or not?" Rau
said.
As usual, the winners were thrilled with the honor.
"Sometimes these crazy things provide a lot of insight," said
Schmidt, the bug guy.
