
Briefing Chat: How 1,000 pairs of buried underpants helped measure soil health
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In this episode: 00:21 Our picks of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes Nature: Buried underpants and a new definition of kissing win 2026 Ig Nobel prizes 07:47 Massive xenon experiment detects tantalizing hint of dark matter Nature: Is this the first glimpse of dark matter? Data point excites physicists Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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a couple of stories we've read about in the Nature briefing, which is of course, Nature's
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Is this episode right for you?
B2 · Upper-intermediate
Comfortable if you already follow TV news
- 84% of the words are B1 or easier.
- 185 words a minute: natural, fairly fast speech.
- 91 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.
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The opening of the episode. The whole transcript is in the player.
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Hi 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 Huntsberg. 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 Nobels! Which were announced yesterday, right?
Yes, that's correct. And for those of us who may not be familiar, this is the parody version of 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 Nobel's celebrate the unusual. They honor the imaginative and they aim to spur interest in science.
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