'Bionic' Plants Can Detect Bombs; What We Know So Far!
Veggies are an important part of people’s diet. They give you vitamins, minerals and now, they can even detect bombs. Popeye’s favorite meal, the spinach plant, has been modified by scientist to be able to detect bombs and other forms of buried ammunition.
BBC News report that without passing a course on chemistry or bomb defusal, these plants have become masters of detection of dangerous foreign bodies buried under the ground. Such plants could be used to monitor groundwater seepage from buried munitions or waste that contains nitro-aromatics, creators of this fascinating project announce.
Live Science shares insight on the interesting topic. According to them, the spinach plants have carbon-nanotube-based nanoparticles in their leaves, which are sensitive to nitroaromatics and give off an infrared light. Nitroaromatics are an essential part of building explosives. These chemicals drench within the ground and when deluded in water, they can be soaked in by the spinach plant.
Once absorbed by the plant, they move to the leaves, where they cause the infrared emission to lose its strength. The signal is being checked by a small sensor, the complexity of which does not go beyond a modern smartphone.
If a change is registered by the sensor, technicians can be sure that there is some kind of pollution which should alarm them.
News MIT gives off information about the versatility and usage of this technique. The nanotube sensors can be implemented not only in spinach, but in any other form of plant that exists on the planet. When it comes to the uses of the technique, for now they detect explosive chemicals, but the laboratory has managed to build dopamine sensors in plants too.
The future of this technology is limited by the imagination of the scientists, since it can be used to detect pollution in water, air, ground, present threats and to follow concentration levels of different dangerous compounds in the environment. Its use is similar to the miner’s canary, with the difference that no one dies with this method.
