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Genetically Modified Flower Detects Landmines
cdneng2 writes "Yahoo has the story that a Danish
company has developed a plant that can detect landmines. The genetically modified weed that has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives buried in soil." The company website has a bit more information.
I realize this is a joke, but to stem the flood of responses by people who didn't RTFA, here's the scoop:
You take a plane, fill it with seed "bomblets" and disperse them over a minefield. The bomblets embed in the soil and the plants grow. Within a few months you have a field of plants, a few of which are a different colour. The ones that have changed colour are close to mines. This makes finding the mines easier, and it also makes it possible to find a safe route through the field by only looking at the colour of the plants.
straight from the article.
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Oestergaard said the problem of sowing the seeds in a potential land mine could be overcome by clearing strips through a field by conventional methods or by using crop planes.
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yes, i'm new here, i did rtfa!
The article already states that these flowers cannot reproduce.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
"Of course, the idea is that these plants should reproduce and grow everywhere..."
No, it isn't. The article specifically states that the plants are sterile and cannot seed.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
and evidently you haven't actually read the article - the plants are infertile (don't themselves produce seeds) to prevent the genetically modified weed from spreading in areas where it isn't wanted.
It is sown from the air or from conventionally cleared strips of land.
It grows in roughly 3 - 6 weeks.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
I think a field full of kudzu is worse than a field full of land mines. After all, you can continue to farm a field of land mines, if you're willing to risk getting blown up. If the field's full of kudzu, you can't farm it any more.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
RTFA. Both suggestions are covered in the article.
Look, I do my field research in the Balkans. There are still swathes of ground you'd better not fucking walk unless you are absolutely sure there are no mines. Even near Plitvice Park in Croatia, there are still quarantined areas within 150 meters of the 'main' road to Gracac. If you need to stop and take a dump in nature (few places to do it otherwise there), you better know the words for "Danger Mines."
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
The article states
The use of land mines was outlawed in the 1997 Ottawa Convention and more than 90 countries committed themselves last year to cleaning up the debris of war to reduce the number of civilian casualties from munitions left by armed conflicts.
However, the USA was not a signatory to this treaty as of 2002, according to this web page. Apparently there were plans to sign in 2006, but the landmine-lovers were working to change those. Has anything changed?
There aren't many other countries that were both democratic and non-signatories: Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Russia, Turkey (but the democracy of some of those might be questionable). The entire "Axis of Evil" made the list, though.
They do say the plants are modified to be genetically infertile and unable to spread their own seeds.
As always there is no guarantee and as we all have heard, plants and especially hardy ones like weeds can cross-pollinate with similar breeds.
it sounds like they are making this issue a big concern however.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The article mentions potentially using it to detect heavy metals in the soil as well such as might be found near nuclear or chemical waste reservoirs.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
For those who are curious, here is a picture of the little guy in bloom - presumably, the entire plant turns red (stem and all) in the presence of NO2, not just the flowers.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
Obligatory kudzu joke:
A man in Texas decided he wanted a nice gazebo in his backyard and wanted some nice ivy growing over it. He didn't want to wait a decade or so for the ivy to grow around the gazebo. He'd heard that kudzu was pretty fast growing though and so he planted some near the base of the gazebo.
A year later he burned the thing to the ground, poured concrete over it, and sold the place. The kudzu probably came back.
Serious notes -- planting kudzu anywhere in the US is a federal crime, a violation of the Noxious Weed Act of 1974. It's virtually impossible to kill the roots -- which can have root nodules the size of a basketball -- and so while RoundUp and similar herbicides will kill the leaves it'll simply be back within a few weeks or months (depending on time of year -- kudzu goes dormant in winter. Never, ever buy any land in the SE US during late fall or winter if there are vines anywhere near; very few other ivys go dormant during this time period). Those root nodules will let it keep doing this for a decade or more.
You are correct, sir.
Some plants just grow big, tuborous root systems, which occaisionally sprout up new, baby plants. Some other plants (like ivy and spider plants) send out shooters, hoping that one of them will land on fertile ground, root and grow.
I've forgotten the technical names for those "reproductive" methods, but there you go.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
My family lives in Cambodia (both NGO workers), one of the most mined countries on earth.
Kids still die everyday because they step on landmines. There are anti tank mines, that will kill you, antipersonal mines, that will cripple you, and UXO (unexploded ordnance) that can do about anything.
You go to the market in certain places in Cambodia, and you see that almost 10% (no kidding) of the population is crippled, one or both legs missing, sometimes an arm... Shit.
Worse: Cambodia has huge monsoon rains, and the floods eventually transform into torrents. So the mines MOVE with time. So there you are, happily walking on a path that has been un-mined last year, and BOOM, the rain had brought a mine right there. Scary.
Even worse. Sometimes UXO (more rarely, mines) go right into the city, because of some construction site that uses sand dug from out of the city, and that has UXO's inside (rare, but it happened to one of our friends doing construction for his NGO).
Anything that can be used in demining should be. You might think that demining mostly occurs in rice fields and stuff but no, in some remote places over there, they have to clear villages *house by house*, garden by garden. There are still millions (litteraly) of landdmines scattered everywhere, and even though the foreign demining teams, and the Cambodians they have trained, do a great job, it never will be enough.
Still, Cambodia is one of the most beautiful countries on earth. Now, most touristic-and-not-so-touristic places are safe, so go there, but stay away from anywhere the locals tell you to NOT go.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Most fertilizer is some kind of nitrate (NO3)... ammonium nitrate, etc. High explosives, such as the type commonly used in munitions, are actually N02 compounds, rather than simple nitrates. The nitrates/nitrites are often used in explosives as the oxidizing agent, sometimes in an internal REDOX reaction, sometime to oxidize an additional reagent. As a fertilizer bomb example, the explosive used in the OK city bombing was basically ANFO (acronym for Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil). It's an explosive agent commonly used in mining, and has a lower brisance rating than most military explosives. Brisance refers to the shattering power of a given explosive, and has to do with the speed or rate of deflagration. ANFO is relatively slow compared to some other agents, and military explosive can be much faster: For instance, if you were a combat engineer taking down concrete bridge pilings, you'd want to take advantage of a faster agent to shatter the concrete, rather than a a slower agent that tends to "burn", rather than rapidly detonate.
For example, Tritonol (trade name for the common explosive TNT, or 2,4,6-TrinitroToluene) is three nitro groups on a Benzene ring (a CH3 group at the number 1 position makes the base molecule Toluene, rather than conventional benzene). A certain percentage of TNT is actually DNT, since the compound deteriorates over time and loses a Nitro Group (becoming 2,4-DiNitroToluene. It takes some work to actually produce a high yield of TNT during the manufacturing process, rather than DNT... progressive deactivation of the ring occurs with addition of multiple N02 groups, though you can manipulate reaction conditions to push the reaction to completion.
Another example would be the Picrate compounds... used during WWI. They are not used much anymore... too hazardous to handle. Picric Acid is chemically very close to TNT, except it's 2,4,6-TrinitroPhenol (think of TNT with the CH3 group exchanged for an alcohol, or OH group, making the base molecule Phenol, rather than Toluene).
The study of high explosives is actually quite fascinating... particularly when you get into the physics of the blast waves themselves. Hang out with bomb or EOD guys if you get the chance; they're geeks with high explosives.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Anti-tank mines have a diameter of 30-40 cm, are 6-8 cm deep and weigh about 10kg. I can also tell you that it not fun at all to carry 2 or more for several kilometers somewhere in the middle of a Finnish forest.
The largest mines are probably anti-personnel claymore mines. They are something like 25cm high and 50cm wide and produce a huge (50-100m) conical storm of shrapnel. They are however usually attached to a tree or similar structure so that the effect acts horizontally taking out a lot of infantry and perhaps unarmored vehicles. The plants are of no use when looking for these.
There are several kinds of mines that can be dispersed from aircraft. the ones I've seen are Russian and are about 10cm wide, 5cm high and look sort of like butterflies so that they can be packed efficiently and disperse widely when dropped. These are not dug into the ground so I doubt the plant will be of much use in finding them. Now someone is thinking that such small mines that are above the ground shouldn't be a problem, but account for the fact that the a plane can drop several thousands in one run. Combine that with toxic gas and/or napalm and it's a really big problem.
The kinds of mines that the plants are probably used to find are anti-personnel mines dug into the ground. These usually consist of an explosive charge 10cm wide and about 10cm high with some shrapnelling stuff in them. On top of that a trigger is attached making the whole contraption just above 15cm high. The whole thing is dug into the ground and covered with a cm or two of dirt so that it goes off when a soldier (or civilian) steps on it.
This post is free (as in cheese in a mousetrap).
article:
Mine Ban Treaty
The Mine Ban Treaty obligates its participants to completely and permanently discontinue the use, production, stockpile, and transfer of antipersonnel landmines; to destroy stockpiles within four years; to clear mines within their own territories within ten years, and to provide continuing assistance to mine survivors.
The Mine Ban Treaty, which went into effect on March 1, 1999, has been signed by nearly three quarters of the world's nations; it came into force faster than any other multi-lateral global agreement. Participants include all of the western hemisphere except the United States and Cuba, and all NATO countries except the United States and Turkey, though Turkey is in the process of acceding to the treaty. Most African nations and many Asian nations have joined the Mine Ban Treaty as well. For the full text of the Mine Ban Treaty, a list of countries that have signed, ratified, or not signed the treaty,
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
America offered to sign this treaty. We liked this treaty. Landmines make no distinction between civilian and military personnel. They maim and kill civilians. However, the U.S. made it clear that the use of landmines within designated demilitarized zones was within the rules of war. And within what the United States considered "fair play".
There had never been a coherent case why landmines can't be used in, for example, the DMZ between North and South Korea. There are no civilians there. No civilians would ever "blunder into" this area. In fact, it's impossible to trespass even if that's your intention . Landmines are there for the express purpose of destroying an invading army. That's the military's job: to kill enemy soldiers and armor.
If the ICBL had acceded to this U.S. condition, we would have signed on. In fact, Clinton issued an executive order which de facto banned the use of landmines outside of declared demilitarized zones which were free of civilians. To be blunt, everywhere except the Korean DMZ.
Has anyone got a good reason why landmines are a bad thing in such an area? They don't kill people any more dead than a machine gun would. And please skip arguments involving civilian casualties, since there aren't any civilians anywhere near the landmines. In fact, by killing soldiers in an area far from civilian populations, such landmines would certainly reduce civilian casualties in a conflict.
I understand why Finland is on the list. Just look at border between us and our big neighbour.
:-)
Another thing... How will those flower work for example in Western Sahara which is mostly hot desert or in Afganistan where there is only rocky mountains and no soil to grow anything? This flower thing may solve the mine problem in quite limited area where land mines are problem.
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I don't time have to register to all these sites.
I think "conventionally cleared" referred to conventional mine clearing, not conventional scrub-brush clearing. But the logic of using an indicator plant works for both types of clearing - mine and brush. Deep mines are often overlooked by mine-clearing operations, but because buried objects tend to gradually work their way to the surface, several people are killed yearly in fields thought cleared of mines. In any event people do often start cultivating land suspected of having mines even without formal mine-clearing having occurred. This usually happens when the alternative is to starve to death. Planting such an indicator grass would be very valuable in both these situations.
This is great spin, and is true as far as it goes, but the REAL reason the US has not signed the treaty is that we are the world's largest exporter of arms, and banning mines would cost US companies MILLIONS of dollars yearly.