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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.

Quote:

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.