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Bomb Detecting Plants To Root Out Terrorists
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Denver Post Reports that a biologist at Colorado State University has re-engineered plants so that they can detect explosives, air pollution and toxic chemicals, signaling the presence of potentially deadly vapors by turning from green to white. 'If you take something into Denver International Airport, like an explosive for a plane, my plants are going to turn white,' says June Medford, who developed the system. 'That's going to get the security guys on you.' Military and Homeland Security research directors say they envision wide applications for the genetically modified plants positioned in buildings, war zones and cities where terrorists could set up covert bomb-making factories and add that strategic placement of the plants could help reach a goal of deploying a decentralized, nationwide system for detecting explosives. 'Our hope is if these plants could be located ubiquitously, we might be able to detect explosives at the point they are being assembled,' says Doug Bauer, the Homeland Security explosives research program manager. 'You would have a much greater opportunity for first-responders to interdict and disrupt that activity.'"
Works great as long as you can wait a few hours for the plant to change color.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
petrifried np and all that stuff....
Ha ha, I see what you did there.
But if you're trying to compete with theregister(.co.uk) you've got your work cut out for you. Good luck.
Doug Bauer, the Homeland Security explosives research program manager
Really?
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
That should be
Bomb-detecting Plants To Root Out Terrorists
Read a different story on this and my favorite quote was that it would probably never be able to pick up on a bomb made with Ammonium Nitrate, because, well, that's fertilizer...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
This is something they've been kicking around for minefield detection for a while. Seed a purported minefield with grass that behaves differently in the presence of explosive, then wait and you can see where to avoid and send the demolition crews.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Groan.
continue building my covert explosives factory but before i head back to it after lunch, buy a box of salt or a bottle of weed killer. terrorists: 1, magic rainbow plant: 0.
Good people go to bed earlier.
We have to remember to water them.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Obviously this whole concept is a bit silly, but how exactly would these plants be able to isolate WHICH passenger was carrying bomb materials, if they happened to turn white?
And as somebody else mentioned, I'm sure it takes a while for the plants to change color..
And I'm sure there are MANY explosives (fertilizer based?) that these things probably wouldn't detect, and probably many things that would cause false positives..
I suppose it might be usefult to plant these things around suspected bomb-making locations, but I'd think that people would get savvy really quick and take a lawnmower to their property....
Um.... isn't this just a fancy canary in a coal mine?
I was wondering what Popcap was going to do for the sequel to Plants vs. Zombies. I guess Plants vs. Terrorists would work well enough.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
This makes sense. When you walk into the airport, you're given a flower pot with soil in it and a seed inside. By the time you get to the security gate, the seed will have grown to a flower. The TSA officers will then let you in based on the color of the flower.
This won't take any more time than usual, because waiting in line at the airport is already like watching plants grow.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Terrorist 1 builds bomb in remote location in a "clean room". Hermetically seals it and drops it off at location A.
Terrorist 2 picks the bomb from location A and and chemically cleans/sterilizes the outside. Then drops it off at location B
Terrorist 3 picks the bomb up at location B and then delivers it to the target.
Oh and BTW Terrorist 3 detonates it in the crowd waiting to get to the security checkpoint before any testing for explosives will be done.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Great, now my salad will be working for the TSA and giving me attitude.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Just send out more spam.
Researchers at the 32nd Street Regional University and Pub have announced a genetically engineered ficus that can detect disloyalty.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
start stocking up on herbicides.
Would they detect if I stink? Would they turn white in a toilet? If no, I don't have any use for this plants.
This system is too easy to defeat. All a troublemaker has to do is get a small amount of the target substance and spread it around to trigger a false alert. For example, just walk in the public areas in front of an airport and sprinkle some powder on the sidewalk and leave. All the people walk in the powder, walk inside and then chaos ensues. This can be done at any scale, so even planing over an entire city will not allow bomb making locations to be located. Although this could be very useful in a limited way, it is not a quick fix for everything.
Why is Snark Required?
Awesome idea, and I'd love for a minefield in the spring to look like beautiful-but-deadly Warhol painting.
But I really don't like one aspect of the plants that my tax dollars are paying for. From TFA:
If the plants are going to detect things that blow up, wouldn't it be a Good Thing for us average citizens to be able to use them? Allowing civilians to become projectile-absorbing materials is something terrorists do... not letting us know that we're walking past a dangerous area seems hardly better.
Oh, but the true purpose becomes clear:
They're NOT developing this in order to make us safer. There are very few landmines on US soil, after all (though Civil War battlefields might resemble a game of Pac-Man). They're just trying to find a cheap way to put more potheads in prison, so they can learn how to be real criminals. (Damned if I can figure out how that makes me more secure... guess I should just let Big Brother do my thinking for me.)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The same way that the check points prevent suicide bombers from hitting the line. This would enable them to stop planes from departing or people from boarding them and just ensure that the terrorists hit the people waiting to be screened.
This is going to be about as helpful as those scanners are, but less likely to result in sexual assault charges being filed against TSA employees.
I'm sorry...
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
They can get to the root of the problem.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
How fast does the indicator work? How much trace is needed to cause indication? How many things can it detect? What explosives or other prohibited materials is it incapable of detecting that really should be that is detected by the other systems in place that can already detect what the plant does?
There are a LOT of other questions in addition to these that would need to be answered before even contemplating the possibility of employing a detection system like these plants.
You want fast detection from tiny traces and specific identification of both the source location and material. But I can imagine it being used for watchdogging an area for certain types of contamination, like detecting a dioxin leak from a chemical storage facility or something like that.
...
Screw the plant, use a damned dog.
It says three hours.
Infuriate left and right
I do chemical sensor research for a living. I was ready to tear this apart, but decided to read the PLoS paper first.
While I do think DTRA is completely crazy to be funding this at a level of $7 million, they are getting very good sensitivity and selectivity (if the PLoS paper is to be believed) for an unattended ambient air device.
The problem really is, as we've discovered the hard way, a highly technical (this needs a good optics system), inflexible sensor really is no good at all. You can't re-program a plant on the fly like you can an electronic nose system or even (with work) a dog. You can easily fool a camera looking in visible or IR with a handful of dust.
And an airport isn't going to use a sensor that responds in 24 to 48 hours - which is the response time in the actual paper, it's just not helpful. My sensors respond on the scale of 1 minute, and that's considered way too slow for security screening.
I'm interested in the selectivity they claim to be getting. My work with protein based sensors has shown the opposite result. Biology responds to EVERYTHING once you take it out of the lab.
(seriously Slashdot, linking a media release over a PLoS article is like telling people they have to pay for Linux. Please stop doing this kind of thing with the open access journals, you're pissing on the community you grew up with. Can you institute an editorial policy to link to open access scientific papers? Would it be that hard? Why do we scientists go through all the trouble to set this shit up if you're still going to link to some half-wrong, mass-media science bullshit journalism?)
Try not to fart around it.
This is going to be about as helpful as those scanners are, but less likely to result in sexual assault charges being filed against TSA employees.
Apparently you haven't seen the Japanese remake of 'Little Shop of Horrors'.