I'm a simple emigrant and I'm interested in science news

Last week in Zurich, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place. This is a humorous scientific prize awarded for real but funny research. This year scientists from Germany were awarded for the smell of teenagers and buried underwear. Don’t worry, these are two different studies. The prize for olfaction: the smell of babies is loved by parents, but the smell of teenagers isn’t particularly pleasant. I have a feeling this study started somewhere in the kitchen, where parents of children of different ages were sitting and discussing something. And one of them stood up and said, “Yes, we can barely stand the smell of our teenage son, and I know for sure that many others feel the same, but I can’t prove it.” Then the other stood up, and, with a sparkle in his eyes, solemnly declared: “This is what I’ll do!” And he went on to prove it and ended up at the Ig Nobel Prize. Behind the joke, of course, lies a serious question: how our sense of smell is connected to social relationships, age, and parental attachment. Prize for soil science: a method of assessing soil health using underwear. The researchers devised an experiment in which they buried 1,000 identical pairs of cotton underwear in more than 25 countries around the world. After two months these underwear were dug up and examined to see how much they had decomposed. And from these remnants they inferred the level of microbial activity in the soil. The more active the soil life, the more the fabric decomposes. To this idea they also involved ordinary people, and you and I had a chance to become part of an Ig Nobel study! All you had to do was go at full moon to a point whose coordinates had been left on a napkin in a Chinese takeaway on the corner, and bury cotton underwear there. Then run around the point three times and say magical words. What words? I don’t know; we weren’t participants. Well, joking aside, the scientists proved that underwear can be used as a cheap and simple measuring instrument that shows biological activity and soil health. Have you had any discoveries yourself? Tell us in the comments! #useful photo: Petra Wolfensberger