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."

Re:Pitch

[Ziwcam]

Simple countermeasure: After placing mines, spray field with explosive residue. Now what?

How long will it live?

[icebike]

It would seem if you could get this strain to survive in the soil for some months you could spray road sides even ahead of the implanting of IEDs.

Re:Pitch

[Ziwcam]

Hey now, I was simply pointing out an obvious shortcoming to the potential usefulness of this in an area where insurgents still want to keep it mined. When used to clean up abandoned minefields, I think this product has the potential to save tons of lives (and limbs). No need for you to wish me into the middle of a minefield simply because I pointed out a potential countermeasure to the product.

Legitimately good idea

[Draque]

Am I the only one here who is aware of how bad of a problem land mines are to civilians in many third world countries? The response here seems generally negative, but if this technology helps to diffuse old land mine fields, it would be wonderful. Just because it was planted in WW2 doesn't guarantee that it's become inactive or that it won't kill you now.

Re:Pitch

[Maximum Prophet]

Or, after one or more mines explode, does the entire field become tainted with explosive residue?

Re:too erasy in the daytimes..

[vlm]

They don't turn green, they glow green.

Kind of like the goo inside a green chemlight...

In the old days, if you wanted to do the area denial thing, you had to buy these expensive, heavy, hard to install landmines.

Then it was discovered you could scare the other guys away merely by using signs that say "landmine". In fact there is a UN standard / requirement for posting landmine signs around a minefield, scary white triangles, if I recall...

Now, technology marches on, and all you need is a big pack of green chemlights from walmart... crack them, drip the liquid in a field, and instant, cheap, area denial... Its also economic warfare, since mine field clearing is very expensive compared to buying a bunch of chemlights. Its also very demoralizing to the troops to know that glowing stuff might or might not be fake.

Re:Dangerous, Tedious, Expensive ?

[jimbolauski]

A friend of mine was in africa a while back and had noticed something peculure when he visited many years ago, the women always walked behind the men, now many years lator, the men walk behind of the women. When he asked one of the viligers if there was a feminist movement and if women were more more prominent, the viliger said No Land Mines!

Re:Pitch

[PRMan]

I had a co-worker from Afghanistan in the past (nice guy). He said that his uncle would do it is to buy a field with land mines on it for cheap and then just let a herd of goats graze the property. If a goat exploded, that one was dinner.

Simple. Cheap. Effective.