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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.
When the kids of 3 world countries run out into the fields to pick the flowers??
Who's going to volunteer to plant them? BOOOM!!! Still, this is a pretty neat idea. Might not be so good for people who are color-blind, like my dad. :)
-1, "1337" speak
I wish Diana Spencer were alive to see this development. I bet she would have gotten other celebrities to underwrite the use of this technology to save countless lives worldwide. But luckily there are other wealthy individuals who might undertake an experiment with this plant, and make that company rich in the process (which is, in the words of Stuart Smalley, "okay").
Elton John will write a song about it, too.
Nice to see a company making a bio weapon that helps people instead of making them die horribly and slowly.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
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
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Shouldn't the gardeners blowing up while planting flowers be enough?
Someone's going to be pushing up the daisies!
Well, this might be one use of GM where the environmentalists can't complain much with all the children maimed and killed by these things each year...
I can just see a field of flowers all one colour.
Then there is one flower that is a different colour, and you think its so unique. You go over to take a look at it...
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.
:-)
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
Use something like a crop duster at a highish altitude to drop the seeds all over large areas of land in third world countries. This will make demining so much easier.
If the environmentalists oppose this, if they can engineer the seeds so that the plants can't have offspring (I forget what the term is), they could drop a ton of seeds over a tract of land they plan to demine, and a few months later finding the mines will be very easy.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
OK, seriously, this is great. Too many kids are missing body parts from old munitions.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This is the kinda thing Genetic Engineering and Modification should be going into, not for Cheaper prices in the supermarket, or Glowing fish,
Lets see more food in starving country's, Less Landmines, and other ways to improve life,
Of course, thats whats been said about just about any new or improved technology in the last what, 30 years?
Despite the fact that this flower may save hundreds of lives and thousands of injuries, anti-genetic research people are bound to delay this from being deploied.
I do think that it will need to be tested to make sure it causes no harm, but it is going to be a great help in some war-torn countries.
Mewyn Dy'ner
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.
Flower power!
Develop the next generation flower that detonates itself, taking out the mine, instead of just turning a different color. You'd probably risk being gunned down by airport security for carrying flowers, but progress comes at a price ...
If you'd read the article, it suggests using crop-dusting planes to plant the seeds. Then, when they see where the mines are, they not only can tell just where to dig, they can see how to get to them safely.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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
okNow, crossbreed them with those heatbeam-shooting Ringworld sunflowers, and you've got something that detects mines, and then blows them up.
Now, how do you get rid of the fields of killer sunflowers covering the landscape? Errmm. sorry, didn't hear that. Gotta go...
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This is ground-breaking technology and it's really cool to see it work to say lives. But I wonder what unintended consequences may occur from planting weeds around. This is very ignorant of me, but what effects could they have if they spread too fast or whatever since some areas where there are landmines are actually agricultural. I guess this technology could be used on other types of plants too, right?
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
All you have to do is look at the numbers in the adjacent boxes.
People are so lazy!
Princess Diana, for one, would have been very happy to see this development. Although her calling a ban on international landmines sparked a row as it was out of sync with the government policy.
Definitely one of the better use of genetics.
Free XBox, PS2
They should make a condom that contains plant material that can detect STD's and change colors accourdingly.
Landmines are fairly small devices so a high plant density would be required. Much land is not easily planted - esp by airplane. It will have to be a remarkable plant to grow in all the conditions it will be needed. They would need one variety for paddy fields, another for savanna, etc etc. To have a chance of getting growing plants in sufficient density you would have to plough the land first.
Paul Beardsell
Sorry, I thought this was about flowers detecting mimes. I was so looking forward to using this during my next trip to New York City. My mistake.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The article already states that these flowers cannot reproduce.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
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
"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
...I've just been using my binoculars.
"Landmine spotted, check your command map."
I didn't even notice a "gardner" class in the limbo screen...
-JDF
But I wonder what happens when it misses some of the mines (E.g. Mines too deep, too new, plant did not grow close enough too it). That kind of defeats the purpose of doing this if they have to double back over the entire field to make sure they have not missed any. I think the idea is awesome, but not fool proof. And the fact that these seeds have to survive, and beat out other plants in the area. I think it is totally fascinating, and a creative idea, but seems to have a very small range of effective uses.
RTFA. Both suggestions are covered in the article.
These plants could be a really inexpensive way of exposing landmines. I really hope this project works out.
Sorry, I've already patented the idea of leaving really useful things unpatented.
Oh, now reassuring. That means they're going to reproduce, escape to the mainland, and make several bad sequels, right? :)
-1, "1337" speak
This might also be useful for World War I battlefields in France and Belgium, where a number of farmers are killed every year by unexploded shells buried underground.
sPh
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.
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.
Will these flowers be genetically engineered to have numbers on them, indicating how many mines are growing in the plots next to them?
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]
Sounds like a swell idea, so long as I don't have be the guy that walks throught the field and plants the seeds...
They're going to be called "MyDoom" blooms.
Watch for them in an e-mail real soon.
I'm no EOD tech, but maybe finding the little buggers is 98% of the problem. Once they are found a person could either just mark and leave them in place or blow them up.
Once the weeds mark the mines, a rich villager could call in the army or police and they will lay a few dollars worth of detonating cord next to the mines and clear the field at 20,000 feet per second. Or the army guy could sit back and take shots at the mines from beyond the minimum safe difference.
The poorer and/or depressed villager could tie a rope onto a chunk of tree or a rock, heave the weight on the other side fo the marked area, get behind a tree and then give the rope a good pull.
Obviously these methods have problems. both would leave a lot of fragments flying around, and are not exactly risk free for the person doing the job.
Call me a cruel, heartless bastard, but this isn't oing to be a problem. All you have to do is tell the villagers to stay away from a certain area while the work is being done. Anybody that forgets or doesn't get the news is just gonna be SOL. If a hut gets a bunch of fragments thrown thru it, then they will have to spend a day repairing it. No big deal.
From what I've been able to pick up, a few flying chunks of metal is not going to be real high on the worry list for people that have land mine problems. Waking up is a bigger risk. Getting enough food, not getting some god-awful tropical disease or not pissing off the latest dictator is going to fill their worry bin.
Most countries that have real land mine issues are desperately poor and need something like these plants just to cut down on their chances of having their kids legs blown off. Rich countries can solve their problems with robotics and large amounts of beer for their off duty ordinance techs.
Right or wrong, certainty is for rich countries. Bravo to these scientists.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
3 to 6 weeks is not a long time considering that many countries have spent upwards of 10 years trying to mitigate their existing landmine problem.
As long as your spreading seed by airplane, just use bird seed... let the birds find the mines!
I think some of those weed genes were around when I was a kid in my parents yard.
:)
But the ones at my parents house only detected dog poop and septic tanks. And they changed the grass from its natural beige color to strange dark-green hue.
People still find unexploded cannonballs in their backyards dating back to the British/French colonial war.
They just use metal detectors though.
Small print: you need to plow the minefield first.
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!
The company "hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years". Vaporware?
Also, are there real cost advantages to use that over, say, little rovers with metal detectors? What percentage of the cost of clearing landmines is spent on detection?
And, as many people have mentionned already, there are a few places with desert conditions where this approach won't be useful.
While this is nice technology (and they at least took care to make the plants infertile, which is great), I don't know if it will have any practical applications. In the meantime, I suggest either badgering your gummint to fund clean up efforts and/or donating to NGOs that are de-mining.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
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.
The biggest problem will be that nitrous oxide naturally occurs in some soils; your false positive rate would be high. Moreover, as explosives rot and decay in the ground, the residue spreads out over a fairly large area. Many military bases are plagued with "pink water" from TNT leachate, for example. As a result, a single landmine might produce a fairly large disc of activity, meaning you'd still need to manually probe for the landmine. In some cases, these are nothing more than plywood boxes, which rapidly degrade when put in place in areas that receive plenty of rainfall. In war-torn areas, trying to find something like this after it has aged, even when you have a rough idea of where it might be, is still hazardous and time-consuming.
Next to this, the biggest problem is going to be that the plant being used is not capable of growing in very dry areas, where landmines are a serious issue (Angola, Namibia, Afghanistan, etc.). Even worse are areas like Kosovo, which receive so much rainfall that the vegetation has grown up and around landmines; wet areas like this have grown trees tall enough to make detection and removal a very serious problem. Large areas are not safely traversable once one leaves pavement, much less mow so that weeds like those used to detect explosives simply won't be visible. They're not tall enough.
There is no panacea to landmines, and although it's good to see one possibility, I doubt many people in the business of landmine removal will find this to be a useful technique, much less stake their lives on it. The folks doing the tinkering in the lab have little or no idea what it's like in the field. It is a very, very difficult problem that a lot of smart people have spent a lot of time on. And it's still not enough.
Will they grow in desserts?
They'll grow in cake and fresh pie, but they won't grow so well in cold climates such as ice cream.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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 Landminesarticle:
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.
What about AFTER the conflict? One of the main problems with landmines is that they hang around after the conflict has finished, unless they're detonated.
But then again, it's not hard to miss just one, maybe two, especially if you aren't organised (like some non-US armies may be).
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.