Briefing Chat: How 1,000 pairs of buried underpants helped measure soil health

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:04)
Hi, listeners, Benjamin here. It's the Friday show, the briefing show. We talk about a couple of stories we've read about in The Nature Briefing, which is, of course, Nature's daily email roundup of the latest science news. Joining me this week is the one and only Maren Huntsberger. Maren, how are you?

**Maren Huntsberger** (0:18)
Hello, I'm great. It's the most wonderful time of the year, Ben.

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:22)
It is. It's the Ig Nobel.

**Maren Huntsberger** (0:23)
The Ig Nobel!

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:24)
Which were announced yesterday, right?

**Maren Huntsberger** (0:26)
Yes, that's correct. And for those of us who may not be familiar, this is the parody version of the Nobel Prizes. It's put together by the Annals of Improbable Research, or AIR. You know, scientists love a good acronym. And in their own words, the Ig Nobel's celebrate the unusual, they honor the imaginative, and they aim to spur interest in science.

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:46)
Right, the founder, Mark Abrahams, said they're there to make people laugh and then make them think.

**Maren Huntsberger** (0:50)
Exactly. Laugh first, think later. And a lot of them are, you know, legitimate science that has real world applications. They just are also hilarious.

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:59)
Right, and you've been looking at the winners then this year. I'm going to give us a few that stood out to you. What have you got?

**Maren Huntsberger** (1:04)
Absolutely. So like every year, there are 10 prizes. And some of these categories match the Nobel's. There's physics, economics, chemistry, medicine, and there's even a peace prize, Ig Nobel, if you can believe it. But then we've got some more unique categories. There's biomechanics, olfaction, or the science of smell, and soil science. And I'm going to start with soil science.

**Benjamin Thompson** (1:24)
Excellent. As someone who studied the soil bacterium in the lab, this one is right up my street.

**Maren Huntsberger** (1:28)
Well, it might be right up your street, and also under your clothes, Ben, because this project is titled Assessing Soil Health with Underpants.

**Benjamin Thompson** (1:36)
Obviously. The two go together marvelously. Tell us about it.

**Maren Huntsberger** (1:39)
Of course. So this is one of my favorites because it's actually also a citizen science endeavor. So these researchers used non-scientist volunteers from all over their native Switzerland to bury 1,000 identical pairs of cotton underpants in various farms and gardens. And then they dug them up again after two months.

**Benjamin Thompson** (1:59)
Right. And the idea, I guess, was that these would be then broken down in the soil?

**Maren Huntsberger** (2:03)
Exactly. So the non-scientist underwear investigators, if you will, took note of the condition of the underpants after they dug them back up, as well as noting down a couple observations about their soil, like number of worms they saw and things like that. And the researchers then did sort of a more formal assessment of underpants degradation, that's an official line from the paper, as well as analyzing the soil samples. And as a result, concluded that cotton underpants can serve as easily accessible soil health indicators.

**Benjamin Thompson** (2:35)
And I must say, I have actually just looked at a few pictures of some of these degraded underpants and any students listening will be like, well, I've seen worse. But some of these are essentially just rags, right?

**Maren Huntsberger** (2:45)
Yeah, exactly. You can tell a lot about the soil, apparently, from the way that the cotton degrades. You've got pH, you've got various microbial activities, other kinds of invertebrates going on, munching on the cotton. So it's fun stuff. And this, as you can imagine, got a lot of play in the media. And because of that, these scientists are saying that they've received reports that other people around the world have taken on this experiment informally, and they have recorded buried underwear in more than 25 different countries spanning almost every continent. And that's buried underwear on purpose.

**Benjamin Thompson** (3:18)
Goodness me. And of course, as we say, laugh first, then think. But soil health is a huge thing, right? It's such a thin layer at the top of the ground, I suppose, is the technical way of describing it. But it's so important for growing food, for example.

**Maren Huntsberger** (3:32)
Absolutely. We need to know as much as we can about soil health and how it changes and what might affect it. And having easy and cheap and accessible ways for people who maybe even aren't scientists to be able to assess the health of the soil in their area could be really valuable.

**Benjamin Thompson** (3:48)
Magic.

**Maren Huntsberger** (3:49)
So my next favorite is actually the Ig Nobel in economics. And this Ig Nobel went to the researchers behind a paper titled Higher Social Class Predicts Unethical Behavior.