‘Proof by Underpants’ offers a cheeky way to test soil - Popular Science

LISTEN | Why citizen scientists buried thousands of undies:Quirks and Quarks9:24Why citizen scientists buried thousands of undiesFranz Bender convinced a thousand people to soil their underwear — and he wasn’t asking for bowel movements. In 2021, the Swiss soil ecologist and his team recruited 1,000 citizen scientists to bury and dig up underwear around Switzerland in an effort to better understand soil and soil health. In September, the research won an Ig Nobel Prize, which is awarded annually for research that makes people laugh and then think. The effort yielded some surprising results for the researchers — and the participants when they unearthed their underwear, which the hungry underground microbes had often consumed down to almost nothing. “I think this moment when people dig out the underwear and look at it, it was really a revealing moment for many,” Bender, who works at the Agroscope agricultural research centre in Zurich, told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald. “It’s fascinating to see that, yeah, soil is really alive, and there’s a lot of life underground that we usually don’t think about.”The research was published in Plants People Planet in Aug. 2026.

“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver had a novel proposal for the Secret Service, which he thinks may have a file on him: Take him to a Broadway show and make sure it’s an aisle seat. In a segment on the president’s protectors Sunday, Oliver delved into the surprising fact that Secret Service agents sometimes entertain potential threats to keep them in sight during presidential visits. Oliver replayed 2018 documentary footage in which a special agent recounted how he tracked a man who once entered ex-President Ronald Reagan’s Bel Air, California, home. (One known trespasser served a two-year sentence for threatening Reagan’s life in 1990.)The agent recalled that when either President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney later came to Los Angeles, and the man was living in a halfway house, he and another agent would take him to dinner and a movie. “We would go make him happy while the president was in town to make sure we knew where he was and keep tabs on him,” he said. That got Oliver thinking. “Given just how much shit I talk about our current president, I’m guessing there’s a non-zero chance the Secret Service has a file on me,” he said.