The Best Science Contest You’ve Never Heard Of

It all started with a bee sting on his testicle. It didn’t hurt as much as Michael L. Smith, a neurobiology and behavior PhD candidate at Cornell University, expected, and he wanted to know why. Did stings hurt more in some areas of the body than others? The best way to find out, he surmised, was to sting himself at 25 different parts of his body and then rate the pain on a scale of 1-10. His resulting “sting pain index” ranked the nostril, upper lip and penis shaft as most painful and the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm as least painful. That study was not only published, but it also won him an Ig Nobel Prize—an annual Harvard University tradition of recognizing strange-but-true research that “makes people first laugh, then think,” according to the ceremony’s founder Marc Abrahams, who also edits the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Smith got one of 10 prizes awarded on Thursday night in Boston. The winners are selected by a panel of about 100 experts, who judge more than 9,000 nominations each year. Another Ig Nobel winner was David L. Hu and a team of Georgia Tech researchers who wanted to understand why most humans, regardless of their size or age, tend to urinate for the same length of time. Hu got the idea for this study when he was potty training his toddlers and thought it was weird that a child and an adult could take the same amount of time to produce vastly different volumes of fluid. He wondered i...
Source: TIME: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Science Source Type: news