(no subject)

[tithonium]

I just learned that there are plants which will tell you if they're growing over a landmine. The flowers turn a different color in the presence of - presumably - the metals commonly used in landmine construction. Or maybe it's detecting the explosives. Tho, that would imply the roots would have to invade the mine casing itself, which seems unlikely.

Either way, that's reasonably awesome. Now somebody just needs to make a few megatons of seed available to the appropriate countries for free.

Comments

[tommusic.livejournal.com]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12LAND.html

Looks like they change color on account of the nitrogen dioxide that seeps out over time. Very cool!

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my understanding was that they were nitroso- or nitrate-sensitive, since most mines these days have vanishingly small amounts of metals in them. This would be a problem for the non-nitrate-based explosives like Sprengels, but those are very rare, expensive, and fussy.

I'd like to see people build roomba-based demining robots, preferably with some sort of Mechanical Turk setup so anything they ran across that was questionable would get flagged and identified by a person across the globe. Or they could just stick anything above a certain size in a big bag made of steel cable, and every once in a while the whole works would go off and self-dispose. The problem with this plan is the power budget for something that could dig up enough ground to get 98% of the mines (which I think is what the UN considers sufficient for calling it 'clear' -- as opposed to most armies, which are content to march their soldiers across territory that only has 70% clearance) because they'd take a lot more fuel than a solar array could produce: it'd be hard to make them completely autonomous.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

I hope it doesn't end up being a noxious weed somewhere. But yeah.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Ideally, that's exactly what would happen. This plant needs to be found in abundance just about everywhere in the world.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Except for the part where noxious weeds destroy ecosystems and harm agriculture. Ideally, they will not be noxious weeds. Ideally, they will be nontoxic, noninvasive, and still do their job.

[princessgeek.livejournal.com]

hydrangeas change color if you pee on them.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Holy crap that's awesome.

I actually remember-- I'm not sure how long ago-- Fishy telling me that he'd had an idea like this, and that he found out someone else was working on it. (I just had to verify to make sure my memory wasn't playing tricks on me.) I just... that's so awesome, remembering that I first heard about this very thing as somebody's pipe dream, and now it *exists*.

[pauldf.livejournal.com]

That is pretty awesome!

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Think these have been in the works or in existence to some extent for a while.

Reminds me of certain grass species that in areas of heavy-metal pollution thrive, compared to other plants. So, you can see the areas of pollution by the density of that grass.

They have some other very cool biological mine-detection schemes. Dogs, of course, have always been an option. But far more disposable is wasps. Turns out you can "train" a wasp to seek out a certain substance (by associating it with food) in a very brief, like less than an hour, time period. They were looking at using them as explosives detectors at airports, etc.

-B.