Swiss scientist soils underpants, wins silly science prize - CBC
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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.
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