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GM cress could seek out landmines
EFL
The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, I could take. This, I'm not too sure...Danish scientists say they have developed a genetically modified plant that will detect unexploded landmines. There are believed to be about 100 million unexploded landmines around the world, posing a daily threat to life.
Niels Bohr was Danish and he was smart; I’m enthused.
Plants developed by Copenhagen firm Aresa Biodetection are said to turn from green to red when they come in contact with explosives in the soil.
That’s almost like a stoplight. I like this better than the terror warning system.
Aresa’s aim is to plant its GM plant - an altered thale cress - in landmined areas. Scientists say that within three to six weeks it will change colour in areas where roots come in contact with nitrogen dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives in the soil.
Cress also makes a good salad.
Ummm... (Oooh! Oooh! Pick me!)... Don't you have to... ummm... plow to plant those things? And wouldn't plowing the ground render the function of the little cressies... uhhh... redundant?
Aresa Chief Executive Simon Oestergaard said the project was still in its early days but it had great potential for land that could be used for different agricultural activities. "We don’t think our invention will completely replace other methods," he said.
I tend to agree.
Landmines are traditionally located by a number of methods including the use of sniffer dogs, heavy machines or metal detectors. The mines can then be carefully removed. Aresa says the seeds could be sown by using an off-the-shelf pump or a crop-spraying plane.
Let’s go with the plane option. I don’t know that I would want to walk about seed spraying the ground with the hopes I might know where mines were in the are I was walking in. I would be afraid of receiving more immediate results.
Carsten Meier, of Aresa, told the BBC that they were working with the Danish army and hoped that field trials in live-mine areas could take place within two years. "We have to convince people who are actually clearing mines that this system is reliable," he said.
Please demonstrate. I will be right ........back here about 100 meters behind you.
Geir Bjoersvik, senior adviser on landmines for Norwegian People Aid, said the development was likely to be "a welcome addition to current methods if successfully passing further testing in areas of operation. This is a promising development in the efforts to find a safe and cost-effective solution to detect mines," he said.
Gier is not very smart.
But the Halo Trust, the Scottish-based international mine-clearing charity with 5,500 deminers and 120 heavy mine-clearing machines around the world, has raised some concerns about the project. Director Guy Willoughby said he was worried that the fresh growth could attract livestock into the mined areas.
(Wouldn’t it be just as effective to seed the area with regular cress and then loose a herd of goats to find the mines.)
As long as you're seeding from the air...
Bob Gravett, senior technical advisor to the Mines Advisory Group, was also sceptical: "Over the last couple of years we have had bees that can detect mines, then rats and now cress."
It would be a pain to follow a bee around looking for mines; my arms would tire.
He said relying on the NO2 seepage would not guarantee that all the mines had been detected, as some are specially sealed.
Being prone to false negative indications is not an acceptable fault in a mine detection alternative.
Firing up the combine for harvest would probably find all that the cress and the goats missed...
"The biggest task in mine clearing is proving that there are no landmines in an area," he told BBC News Online. "This is not going to give you any more than an indication and we already have that, from the local population."
We don’t actually even have to talk to the villagers. Usually we can tell by watching them walk around.
Or not walk around...

Posted by: Super Hose 2004-01-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=25184