THE MEDIA VIRUS PODCAST — B BLOCK 302: DROP YOUR DRAWERS AND TEST THE SOIL! 🩲🌱

THE MEDIA VIRUS PODCAST — B BLOCK: DROP YOUR DRAWERS AND TEST THE SOIL! 🩲🌱

Apparently, science has finally answered the question nobody was asking: How good is your dirt at eating underwear?

This week in B Block, The Infection Team digs into one of the strangest citizen-science experiments we've encountered yet: roughly a thousand people across Switzerland buried pairs of cotton underpants in their gardens, fields, lawns and other assorted patches of dirt — and then dug them back up two months later to see how much of their drawers had disappeared.

And the results were surprisingly dirty.

Private gardens chewed through roughly 58% of the cotton, while lawns managed around 40%. Arable fields came in around 51%, with permanent grassland around 47%. Scientists used the decomposition of the underwear as a rough indicator of what was happening beneath the surface — basically turning a pair of white briefs into a soil-health test.

Because apparently soil scientists looked at test tubes, sensors and laboratory equipment and eventually said, “Fuck it. Send in the underpants.”

We get into what the disappearing drawers actually tell researchers about soil fertility, microbes, nutrients and decomposition — including the surprising finding that the test may say more about soil fertility than overall soil health.

So grab your shovel, your gardening gloves and the least expensive pair of underwear you own.

B Block is going to the garden.

And we're leaving the pants there.

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