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Spinach Plants Turned into Bomb Detectors

posted by martyb on Tuesday November 01 2016, @11:48AM   
from the set-the-timer-to-9-minutes dept.

takyon writes:

The BBC is reporting on MIT's "bionic spinach":

By embedding tiny tubes in the plants' leaves, they can be made to pick up chemicals called nitro-aromatics, which are found in landmines and buried munitions. Real-time information can then be wirelessly relayed to a handheld device.

The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) work is published in the journal Nature Materials [DOI: 10.1038/nmat4771] [DX].

The scientists implanted nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes (tiny cylinders of carbon) into the leaves of the spinach plant. It takes about 10 minutes for the spinach to take up the water into the leaves. To read the signal, the researchers shine a laser onto the leaf, prompting the embedded nanotubes to emit near-infrared fluorescent light. This can be detected with a small infrared camera connected to a small, cheap Raspberry Pi computer. The signal can also be detected with a smartphone by removing the infrared filter most have.

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Original Submission

• Re:Done before Re:Done before (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday November 01 2016, @12:35PM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday November 01 2016, @12:35PM (#421229) Journal

  "The plants could be use for defence applications, but also to monitor public spaces for terrorism related activities, since we show both water and airborne detection," said Prof Strano. "Such plants could be used to monitor groundwater seepage from buried munitions or waste that contains nitro-aromatics." Using the set-up described in the paper, the researchers can pick up a signal from about 1m away from the plant, and they are now working on increasing that distance.

  You could see this in airports, or possibly distributed throughout public spaces. Whether that kind of spending is useful is another question. Is the "terrorism" spending useful? Or maybe the setup (RasPi + laser + camera + spinach + gardening upkeep) is too cheap to be useful to defense contractors.

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• Re:Done before (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @01:08PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @01:08PM (#421231)

  Defense contractors would find a way. They always do :)

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