The competition to get headlines for supposedly groundbreaking studies has reached a fevered pace (at least that what my surveys suggest); and those headlines are often more about shock value than merit. So you’ve got to hand it to the researchers who put in the extra effort to stand out. And indeed, several of them were handed awards during the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony held at Harvard. Among the winners were a pair of researchers who each sought to determine the intensity of pain caused by insect stings. One focused on insect type while the other focused on sting location as he “pressed bees up against different parts of his body until the insects stung him, five stings a day, a total of 25 different locations, for 38 days.” (Here’s my abstract of his scientific findings: whenever possible, pants should be worn around bees.)

+ For a very intriguing story about health (and studies in general), take a look at this NYT piece on the Inuits and what we didn’t understand about all those earlier Omega-3 studies.