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

Introduction to the Ig Nobel Prizes

0:00Hi, listeners. Benjamin here. It's the Friday show, the briefing show, where 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? Hello. I'm great. It's the most wonderful time of the year, Ben. It is. It's the Ig Nobel. The Ig Nobel. Which were announced yesterday, right? Yes, that's correct. And for those of us who may not be familiar, this is the parody version

0:30of 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 Nobels celebrate the unusual, they honour the imaginative, and they aim to spur interest in science. Right. The founder, Mark Abrahams, said they're there to make people laugh and then make them think. 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. Right. And you've been looking at the winners then this year. I'm going to give us a few

1:02that stood out to you. What have you got? Absolutely. So like every year, there are 10 prizes. And some of these categories match the Nobels. 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.

Assessing Soil Health with Underpants

1:21Good.

Assessing Soil Health with Underpants

1:22And soil science. And I'm going to start with soil science. Excellent. As someone who studied a soil bacterium in the lab, this one is right up my street. Oh, it might be right up your street and also under your clothes, Ben, because this project is titled Assessing Soil Health with Underpants. Obviously. The two go together marvellous. Tell us about it. Of course. So this is one of my favourites because it's actually also a citizen science endeavour. 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

1:58them up again after two months. Right. And the idea, I guess, was that these would be then broken down in the soil? 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 analysing the soil samples. And as a result, concluded that cotton underpants can serve as easily accessible

2:33soil health indicators. 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? 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

3:06around 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. 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. Absolutely. We need to know as much as we can about soil health and how it changes and what

3:37might 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.

Unethical Behavior and Social Class

3:49Magic.

Unethical Behavior and Social Class

3:50So 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. OK. All right. Well, let's unpick then what that means in practical terms. So the way this researcher described it when he talked to our reporter at Nature for a story on the Ig Nobel is that he described that in their experiments, they found that wealthier participants were more likely to, for instance, cut off pedestrians,

4:19lie at work and cheat in games to win small sums of money. And in one particular experiment that was included in this paper, they set out a bowl of candy that was explicitly identified as being reserved for children. And wealthier individuals in the study were significantly more likely to take more candy from the children's bowl. Goodness. Literally taking candy from a baby. I mean, it's easy to clutch one's pearls, perhaps literally, but what can we learn from this? Well, the interesting conclusion that the researchers posit was that this could possibly or probably be

4:52linked to the fact that upper class individuals may have a predilection towards more unethical tendencies, partially potentially accounted for by their more favorable attitudes towards greed, which would account for their increased wealth. So yet again, then, I suppose, one that gives you pause for thought and maybe speaks to the world that we live in. Let's have one more. Let's go ridiculous.

The Structure of Cockroach Milk

5:16OK, OK. Here's a really fun one. It's my personal favorite from this year's list, and it's the Ig Nobel in Chemistry. It's for a paper titled, stay with me now, it's going to be complicated, structure of a heterogeneous glycosylated lipid bound in vivo grown protein crystal at atomic resolution from the viviparous cockroach diploptera punctata. That's easy for you to say. And I would like the listener to know that I did that all in one take the first time around. All right. So cockroach is important and viviparous, which I think means giving birth to live young.

5:48You hit the nail on the head right there, Ben. Yes, viviparous means giving birth to live young. So this paper is about the structure of cockroach milk. Finally. I've been waiting for it. So obviously cockroaches do not lactate in the same way that mammals do. But viviparous cockroaches don't lay eggs. They give birth to live young because they've been incubating those insect embryos inside their bodies and inside wherever those embryos are being kept in the reproductive tract. The mother cockroach is secreting this incredibly high protein nutritious

6:20fluid, which we're calling milk because that's the analog for us, right? We've just sort of named it that. But this paper, and this was actually published back in 2016, but it's being honored because it was the first to actually reveal the protein structure and the crystal structure of this material. Right. And there were a lot more words in the title. I guess knowing that some cockroaches produce inverted commas milk is one thing, but I'm guessing there's more to this. Exactly. So the reason that this is potentially important for future applications is because obviously extracting milk from cockroaches is not a viable mass production strategy.

6:55We're not going to be able to farm and then extract that milk from the insect themselves. But when we know more about the actual structure of the protein, that gets us one step closer to potentially being able to synthesize it. And that would be important because other work since then has explored, you know, further things about this milk and it's three times more energy dense than buffalo milk, which is already more dense than cow's milk. So this could be a potential future of food application. I mean, as someone who was born in the late 20th century in the UK and is a massive nerd,

7:26I can't help but think of the Red Dwarf episode where they end up drinking dog's milk in their long range space mission because it tastes the same when it's gone off as when it's fresh. And that taste is terrible, which is why it lasts so long because nobody wants to drink it. This is my big curiosity after reading this paper is I want to know what cockroach milk tastes like. And maybe, who knows, in the future on space missions, we could be drinking synthesized cockroach milk.

Searching for Dark Matter WIMPs

7:47Right. Well, it falls to me once again to try and follow that, Marin. And I've got a story that I read about in Nature, and it's based on a preprint and some results announced at a conference. And it's about a WIMP, which is not me in this instance, but specifically a potential weakly interacting massive particle. I've heard about these. Researchers have been looking for them for ages. Now, multiple caveats ahoy, but a single data point from a detector containing 10 tons of ultra pure liquid xenon registered an unusual energetic

8:23flash. I love it when liquid xenon does that. Well, quite. And this is the type of signal that could be caused by a collision between an atom's nucleus in this detector and a massive dark matter particle as it passes through our galaxy. This is the WIMP. Dark matter. Man, this is the big mystery that has plagued modern physics since modern physics has been modern physics, right? Right. And dark matter is thought to make up, what, 85% of the universe. It's this invisible

8:53stuff that's thought to help keep galaxies from flying apart. All these sorts of things. But no one's ever seen it. And this experiment maybe is a start of the process of potentially finding it. I can't say many more synonyms for that. But if this finding can be backed up with more data, it could mean that dark matter has finally been discovered. And it would show that dark matter consists of particles that are much bigger than protons. And these are these WIMPs. And these have been theorized for a long time, but remain undetected despite decades of

9:27searching. So this energetic flash could be the result of a WIMP being detected. Maybe. And this was detected by researchers working with the Lux Zeppelin, the LZ, maybe you'd say LZ experiment, which started up in late 2021. Now, this is in a former gold mine in South Dakota, and it's a scaled up version of earlier experiments. And these aimed at direct detection of dark matter using xenon. And in this instance, collaborators analyzed 220 days of observational

9:59data taken from March 2023 to March 2024. And in this instance, they focused on looking for rare flashes that occur when a high energy particle collides with a xenon nucleus, making it recoil at high speed. And focusing on high energies is different to what other researchers have done. But yes, in this data, they found N equals one flash. Okay, potentially huge. But what makes these researchers think that this could be a WIMP and not something else? Yeah, this is a fair question. And this does need to be confirmed. There are other potential sources

10:31that could explain this signal, maybe traces of background radioactivity, things like that. And this all needs to be checked. But the researchers decided it was important enough to put this result out there. But what's hopeful is, if the signal is genuine, more data already collected by LZ, LZ, as well as a couple of other experiments, the wonderfully titled Panda X in China, and the xenon collaborations should be able to confirm it. So yet again, it is a watch this space. Now,

11:03for decades, as I say, theoreticians have put forward that the prime component of dark matter is a WIMP. But attempts to detect dark matter, this kind of ghostly stuff as it passes through or across Earth, whatever it may be, have really come up short, as have attempts to make it by smashing atoms into each other. So yeah, previous experiments with hopeful science have turned out to be spurious. But I think from reading this article, it seems that researchers are tentatively excited.

11:33Now, I think part of that is because they've been looking for so long, and anything to sort of latch onto is exciting. Only time will tell, of course, but rest assured, we will be talking about it on The Nature Podcast, if and when it's confirmed. It's going to be huge news. And I love this story, because it's such a great example of how dark matter isn't detected in one singular experiment. It's going to take a lot of these stepwise, small, potential, maybe observations, verifying, replicating, and making sure to get to a point where we might be able to have a little bit more of a solid understanding of this huge mystery.

12:04Absolutely right. We'll keep our fingers crossed then. But I think that's it for this week's edition of The Briefing Chat. We'll put links to both of those stories in the show notes and a link where you can sign up for The Nature Briefing to have even more stuff like this delivered directly to your inbox. But for the time being, I've been Benjamin Thompson. Maren Hunsberger, thank you once again for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, and thanks for listening.