Dutch scientist wins Ig Nobel prize with 1,000 buried pairs of underpants
A Dutch scientist has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for burying over 2,000 pairs of white cotton underwear. Professor Marcel van der Heijden and three colleagues from Switzerland and Germany aimed to gain greater insight into soil health by studying how microorganisms broke down the buried underpants.
The researchers from Agroscope and the University of Zurich, where Van der Heijden works in the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, asked 1,000 volunteers from across Switzerland to bury over 2,000 pairs of white cotton underpants according to a set procedure. They initially considered using scraps of cotton or socks, but decided that underpants would attract more participants.
After two months underground, volunteers dug up their underpants again, took photographs, and sent a soil sample to the researchers - Van der Heijden, Franz Bender, Atlant Bieri, and Pia Viviani. Most of the buried underpants had been broken down by microorganisms, indicating healthy soil.
The researchers accepted their Ig Nobel Prize with a song about how they love their buried cotton underpants, and throwing pairs of - apparently clean - underpants into the audience.
They cited a quote from Leonardo da Vinci, who famously said that we know more about the movement of the celestial bodies than the soil underfoot. “500 years later, this is still true. We don’t know much about soil. But luckily, science provided us with an advanced, scientific instrument,” researcher Franz Bender said, referring to the white cotton underpants.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded every year to scientists whose research makes people laugh, and then think. This year’s theme was fungi.
For the first time, the award ceremony did not happen in the United States, but was held in Zurich instead. After 35 years in the U.S., the organizers decided to move the ceremonies to Europe. “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country. We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year,” said Marc Abrahams, founder and emcee of the ceremony.
Since the first ceremony in 1991, Dutch researchers have won an Ig Nobel Prize 22 times. Last year, a Dutch study from Maastricht University received a reward for discovering that German students spoke better Dutch after having a few drinks. In earlier years, Dutch researchers won studies involving flipping a coin 350,757 times, racing drunk and sober worms, boredom in classrooms, people’s heartbeats on first dates, dirty banknotes, and pedestrians not bumping into each other when walking on the sidewalk.