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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.
Stop to smell the roses, and go BOOM? :)
Actually, this is a pretty smart idea. Maybe they should code it into something really fast growing, like kudzu.
-Ed
Ed Wedig
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One of my professors does research in nanotechnology. He is currently growing nanotubes in his lab and one of the applications of this technology is as a detector, such as what this plant does, only at the nano-scale. Apparently when the technology matures, detectors of certain types of illnesses can be made. By a drop of blood on the detector, one can learn the results instantly instead of waiting for human analysis. Very cool.
It's even self-limiting, so despite being a weed it won't choke out the local flora.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Sure, out in the African bush you would not expect to find fertilisers but I extect some of the mine hot zones in Asia are fertilised quite heavily.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Landmines are a HUGE problem in so many countries. Engineers Without Borders has a yearly competition for de-mining technology. These plants could make the new devices obsolete.
One quick question: what about minefields in the desert? Plenty of places have mines where plants don't usually grow (or at least not densely enough for the plants to detect them all).DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okRTA -the plant is infertile, so it won't spread into unwanted areas. They'll probably spread the seed from aircraft hoppers - it'll have a fairly light seed casing.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
If the ground's been fought over, it's probably very fertile now. Not only because of the blood spilled, but because the nitrates from the munitions get into the soil.
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There is something marvelously just and poetic about using flowers to detect land mines. Thousands of children and innocents a year are blown to giblets, or horribly hutilated, by land mines. May a thousand flowers bloom.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Kind of puts a new twist on the old anti-Goldwater commercial, eh?
Any kid growing up in a country where landmines are a problem is probably very likely to listen to the nice soldiers that say "stay away from flowers that look like this... we grow them on mine fields."
The alternative is to further engineer the flowers to look or smell unpleasant, so kids will leave them alone.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The nice thing about these flowers is they have a pretty good idea of what the market will be like. Price the seeds so that de-mining the world will cover the research and production costs, leaving about a 10% profit.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The US military has an issue with getting rid of landmines. North Korea. The entire defense of South Korea weighs heavily on the use of landmines (both anti-personnel and anti-tank).
The US does, however, clean up areas that it's mined once it's done with them. I doubt it's a perfect job, but it's considerably better than the vast number of military forces that use mines and don't clean them up (which is where the issue has come from).
If anyone can suggest an equally effective deterrent to invasion that requires an equal amount of manpower, I'm sure the US Army would like to hear about it.
It's not an issue of "landmine lovers", it's an issue of doing protection in an effective manner. (Which, BTW, is the condition on signing in 2006... AFAIK, nobody has stepped up to the plate). I haven't found any reports of the US using landmines anywhere else -- including Iraq -- since 1997 (the mines at Guantanamo were removed in 1999). They did stockpile them, but they apparantly weren't used. The US has not sold landmines internationally since 1993.
BTW, you missed Pakistan, Georgia, Belarus, Egypt, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Mongolia (parliamentary - very much questionable), Morocco (constitutional monarchy; similar to the UK's), Nepal, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Tuvalu. All have some form of representive government along the lines of a republic or democracy (no, the US is not a democracy -- it's a republic). Between those and the ones you listed, it's about a third of the list. Admittedly, some of the countries on the (full) list probably just haven't bothered -- particularly Tuvalu and Tonga.
1997 Mine Ban Treaty - NON SIGNATORIES
This is the list of the 44 countries that have not signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty as of 23 October 2003.
(Source International Campaign to Ban Landmines