This year, the prizes presented by genuine Nobel laureates honored between others Michael Smith, a Cornell University graduate student who allowed himself to be stung about 200 times by bees to determine where you feel the most pain on the body from a sting and Mark Dingemanse and two colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, for determining that the word “huh” is used in languages around the world for fixing language misunderstandings. 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 Raghu Rau, professor of finance at the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues won for their study that found business leaders more directly affected by natural disasters as children took less risk during their careers. To complete make laughing, each winner received a cash award: a Zimbabwean 10 trillion-dollar bill, the equivalent of a couple of U.S. dollars.
