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Engineered Bacteria Glows To Reveal Land Mines
MikeChino writes "Sifting through minefields to remove hidden threats is a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap. The new strain of bacteria can be sprayed onto local affected areas or air-dropped over entire fields of mines. Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present."
Now they'll either lace the entire field with C4, or they'll start using remote detonators when people move in to disarm.
This would likely be used for already existing minefields. Afghanistan is the most mined country in the world, and cleanup efforts are very tedious. I think that is the market for this product.
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Now they'll either lace the entire field with C4, or they'll start using remote detonators when people move in to disarm.
The largest problem with land mines is that there are so many in areas where there is no longer any kind of combat - kids or other civilians go in the fields and lose life and limb. This helps with that. We're talking WW2 era stuff here.
Modern warfare by insurgents is ALREADY past mines, since they don't have an endless amount of money to spend - they already place explosives and use remote detonators when troops come by.
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Also useful in Southeast Asian countries, where cleanup is all but ignored by local government, and the practical cost of disposal is roughly 1 human appendage per mine.
A nifty idea, but there are countermeasures a miner might take that are easy to implement.
a solution of solvent and typical mine explosive, either sprayed over the entire field of installed mines, sprayed over un-mined areas that you'd like to slow them down, or better yet, spray patches randomly over an installed mine field so that there are many false positives, indistinguishable from the tell of a real mine. Do all of these randomly so that a detection will require a thourough seach no matter what. Thats the whole point of a mine field anyway...
Edge a real mine field with 50 meters of false spots. Regions of false spots bordering regions of mines, randomly shaped and sized.
Encapsulate mines with impermeable skin... ziplok?
Saturate the ground with a persistent anti-microbial =)
Saturate only some of the field with anti-microbial =D
No, you're right -- it is a very good idea.
The problem is, all these critics are a teeny bit right when they say it's not going to work. Alas.
Not so very many years ago, there was an initiative to grow flowers whose petals turn red if they hit a mine. A lot more practical than bacteria, and it seemed to work very well, too -- but they got booted out of that African country they were testing in rather rough-handedly. It's a sad tale, but the fact is there are more warmongers than do-gooders and these things are immensely difficult to see to fruition.
I do wish them luck, though.
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They don't turn green, they glow green. So you just have to go mine clearing in the dark.
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Why is this parent modded 'funny' ? In Eastern and African countries little kids *are* actually being used to detect mines: by blowing them up, and losing their arms, legs, or lives... I do not see what's so funny about that at all...
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In response to the overwhelmingly negative comments, two points.
First: This is most likely meant to clean up minefields surrounding civvy areas created in previous conflicts, as many others here with functional brains have noted.
Second: No, it will not be perfect. Nothing ever is. However, as the saying goes "perfect is the enemy of good." If you persist in saying this is pointless because it won't detect every mine, compile a list of all the things that would not be done if they weren't perfect. It's a short (read: nonexistent) list, I promise you.
Remember, it's not a crime to use your head.
As long as it doesn't result in any false negatives, I think it sounds like a great product for speeding up sweeping. Even if half of a 'field does end up alight, at least they can ignore the dark portions and concentrate on the lit areas.
In a sparsely mined area it could save weeks, months or years of painstaking work - or a few limbs in the case where currently nobody is bothering to sweep the area clean at all.
The next step is for the bacteria to auto dissolve the explosives, kind of like that blue stuff in Predator, heh. I just hope these little guys don't have the potential to cause more problems than they solve!
which is totally what she said
Exactly. They have the logic backwards. What if an area didn't get covered in spraying? So that area would be "dark" and they think it's safe? Yikes, that's a false negative. They need to reverse it to avoid that false negative.
If the bacteria only glow WITHOUT the presence of landmine. That way, at best you get false positives which is less dangerous than a false negative, in this situation.
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Note quite right. The assurance IS the millions of other species of bacteria. All life is compromise, and a bacteria which mutates and becomes ultra-lethal to humans will probably be eaten by its neighbour bacteria, which is more suited for such mundane things as surviving in the soil where they live.
It's the same reason why the grey-goo scenario is silly. The earth may look beautiful and pristine, but in reality it's a shockingly hostile environment. You've got a corrosive atmosphere (full of nasty oxygen), soaked in a potent solvent (water) and it's infested by machines, tiny and small, which delight in consuming everything around them. You think Mars is a hostile environment? The rovers wouldn't have lasted a month in most of earth's biomes. We just don't notice, most of the time, because evolution (and our own intelligence and experience) has made us very, very, very good at survival.
That might happen under natural selection, after a few hundred (thousand?) years. But we artificially select these bacteria for their ability to glow in the presence of boom-dust, therefore natural selection is irrelevant.
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why can't they do something similar and temporarily be celebate to avoid being responsible for all of that misery and suffering?
The social/cultural issues are for more complex then that. A vast majority of women in these countries can't because they don't have the rights to. The stats on rape in some countries are hideous, and many women are stuck in relationships where they can't tell their partner to use birth control and they can't get out of these relationships for any number of religious/socio-economic/cultural reasons. The guys in many of these countries still have this idiotic notion that using a condom isn't manly and therefore won't, hence why HIV/AIDs rates are also awful in many of these countries. Irresponsible sex is gonna happen 'cause of social/religious/cultural reasons so long as the men in these cultures believe that sex makes them a man and women find that one of the most reliable forms of security/employment is prostitution or being someone's girl.
But wait, it gets worse. Assuming you can change cultural ideas of sex and gender, birth control isn't the easiest thing to get because of foreign aid policies concerning family planning. In countries where people can barely eat, reliable birth control is often considered an unnecessary expense by many, so the options boil down to condom giveaways and (often illegal) abortions. Currently organizations that provide abortions can get aid, but this stance changes every administration (Bush banned aid to these organizations.) A good number of the organizations that provide abortions are also the ones that provide family planning support and information, like condoms. Then there are the organizations that are limited in what they can provide because the regions are too dangerous to work in or there are religious/cultural barriers to birth control.
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Its not an addiction you arsehole - its a biological imperative to fuck each other!
If you lived in a situation where you were dirt poor (not can't afford rent poor - but can't afford the 3p can of beans poor), had absolutely no entertainment beyond watching the occasional soldier get eaten by lions, and generally lived a life of suffering day after day, continuing to struggle only because you don't let the alternative to survival cross your mind; then maybe you would understand the need to find comfort and joy where you can.
IF it was just a matter of waiting till the shop opens so you can buy more condoms, you would have a point. But if you didn't know when the next truckload of the things was even going to make it the closest town, let alone disseminated down to your village, then you wouldn't be holding your breath or your balls mate and you're disgustingly naive if you think you could or would.
If we could swap muppets like you for these starving people, and fill the destitute countries with morons that think 'trying harder' is all that is required, we would be able to solve more than one set of problems in one go.