It’s not often you’ll hear excitement about the most disgusting y-fronts, but a group of Aussie scientists have been very excited about the dirty, rotten y-fronts they’ve been sent in recent times.
From: Undie Warehouse
The “Soil Your Undies” research project is designed to assess the soil health around Australia. Apparently cotton y-fronts are the perfect medium to bury and assess the soil. Dr Oliver Knox said, “The more the undies break down, the better shape your soil is in.” The undies were buried for 8 weeks, dug up and assessed.
A lot comes down to organic carbon levels and some of he soils in the south do not have as higher carbon levels to spark the biological activity.
Moisture is also important, if there’s no moisture there’s little microbial activity and it is the same at times of excess moisture when the soil becomes anaerobic – just because the undies didn’t break down does not mean it is automatically bad soil.[Farmers] can have a look at what they need to do to improve their soil structure, there are obviously constraints in Australia but equally there are things that can be done to get things in better shape, such as planting legume crops or looking at a crop with a long tap root to open up the soil structure.
Dr Knox
You can see from the photo below there were vast differences in the post-burial state of the undies. Many schools and community groups were involved in the research. Would you bury undies in your yard in the name of science?
June 4, 2021 at 9:12 pm
Okies Aussie translations please: what is a y-front? LOL is it that style of underwear?
June 4, 2021 at 9:51 pm
Oh 🙁 I thought everyone would know y-front, I didn’t realise that was an Aussie thing. Yeah, it’s a style of men’s underwear (I’ll add an image to the post to make it clear!)
June 4, 2021 at 9:53 pm
😂😂😂 we call them briefs here. Or “tightie whities” LOL
June 4, 2021 at 9:55 pm
Undies or jocks and this style specifically are y-fronts.
June 4, 2021 at 11:07 pm
Haha such a weird cultural difference LOL
June 5, 2021 at 8:54 am
Interesting research project.
June 6, 2021 at 12:48 pm
Seems to be an archaic project. This is the 21st century. There are so many devices that could do the same thing.
I wonder about the use of colored undies too, maybe even boxer briefs.
June 8, 2021 at 7:05 pm
There are many devices, but they cost money and the team wanted to get the data at the same time from as many sites around the country as they could. So schools, community groups, farmers etc all jumped on board and did the undie thing. Now with that data they can focus their research (a cheap and timely way of finding appropriate sites for further study).
June 8, 2021 at 7:04 pm
I thought it was interesting and clever.
June 13, 2021 at 11:27 am
Well, this is fascinating! Anything for science!
June 14, 2021 at 5:12 pm
Lol, absolutely. At least they were clean undies…