Student suffers 25 stings to net IgNobel

Studies fitting chickens with prosthetic “dinosaur tails”, looking at the plausibility of fathering 888 children, and discovering the most painful bee sting points on the body are all among the latest winners of “Ig Nobel” awards.

The awards, parodying the Nobel Prizes, are given out each year for the most unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research.

Of this year’s winners, no-one was more deserving than Phd student Michael Smith, from Cornell University in the US, who tested the painfulness of bee stings on 25 locations on his own body.