The 2015 Ig Nobel prizes have been given, honoring the strangest and most apparently useless advances in science. The latest winners of ‘Ig Nobel’ awards include studies fitting chickens with prosthetic ‘dinosaur tails’, looking at the plausibility of fathering 888 children, and finding the most painful bee sting points on the body etc.

The awards are parody of the Nobel Prizes, and are awarded every year. The Ig Nobel Prize, has reached in its 25th year. Among this year’s Ig Nobel winners the most deserving was the guy Michael Smith, from Cornell University in the US. He tested the painfulness of bee stings on 25 places on his own body. According to him the most painful parts to be stung were the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft.

In the journal PeerJ, Mr. Smith said, “For the most painful locations, sting depth may be important, because the skin is thinnest on the genitals, followed by the face. Stings to the nostril were especially violent, immediately inducing sneezing, tears and a flow of mucus”.

Researchers carried out the chicken study to investigate the idea that birds have actually survived dinosaurs that managed to stay alive and avoid a meteor impact 65 million years ago.

For the chicken study, scientists led by Bruno Grossi, from the University of Chile in Santiago, set artificial tails to chickens. They then noticed that the birds began to adopt the posture of theropod dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives.