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A man has earned scientific recognition after he agreed to let a bee sting him on his penis in the name of research.

Michael L Smith let the insects loose on his own body, ending up with stings on his male appendage and 24 other places.

His dedication to the cause earned Smith an Ig Nobel prize for physiology and entomology.

The Ig Nobel prizes seek to celebrate achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think, as a spoof on the more serious Nobel Prize awarded in Sweden, which will be announced next month.

The annual prizes, meant to entertain and encourage global research and innovation, are awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research.

Read more: I let bee sting me on the penis and the scrotum to see which hurt more

But although Smith, from Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, carefully arranged for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body to learn about pain, he ended up sharing the gong with another researcher.

On his research, Smith explained: "If you’re stung in the nose and the penis, you’re going to want more stings to the penis, over the nose –if you’re forced to choose.

"There’s definitely no crossing of wires of pleasure and pain down there. It’s painful. Getting stung on the nose is a whole body ­experience. Your body really reacts. You’re sneezing and wheezing and snot is just dribbling out. It’s electric and pulsating."

But perhaps even more galling was that his Ig Nobel prize is jointly awarded to Justin Schmidt, for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects.

Smith, who previously studied bee-keeping at Atlantic College in Cowbridge near Cardiff, took agitated bees in forceps and applied them to 25 different areas of his body. He then rated the resulting pain from zero to ten.

His injuries on the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm were ruled the least painful and on the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft were the most painful.

Marc Abrahams, awards founder closed the awards event with the customary punchline: "If you didn't win an Ig Nobel prize tonight - and especially if you did - better luck next year."

Other prizes for unusual exploits include the chemistry prize given to Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston from Australia, and Tom Yuan, Stephan Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin Pugliese, Tivoli Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, Gregory Weiss [USA], for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.

Among the 10 awards, three went to teams of researchers that revealed that nearly all mammals regardless of size take about 21 seconds to pee, showed it is possible to partially un-boil an egg with chemicals, and used math to determine how a North African emperor from the 17th century fathered 888 children in just 30 years.

Other teams earned prizes for attaching a weighted stick to a chicken's rear end to demonstrate how dinosaurs might have walked, and for showing that acute appendicitis can be diagnosed by how much pain a patient feels when driven over speed bumps.

Former winners of real Nobels handed out the spoof awards at the ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organised by Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals.

The ceremony included a three-act mini-opera about a competition between the world's millions of species to determine which one is the best.