

Giant rats put noses to work on Mozambique's landmines - edward
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jan/22/giant-rats-mozambique-landmines

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bostik
If that works as advertised, there should be plenty of other areas to clear
afterwards. Hell, my brother-in-law spent two years in Kosovo (as a UN
peacekeeper) a few years back. He said that even then there were large areas
of land that were still off-limits to people because of uncleared mines.

Despite the danger, and the warning signs, some locals are desperate enough to
seek arable land where ever they can. One can only imagine what happens when
they hit a 10-year old mine.

I was told it's not pretty.

~~~
mschuster91
Landmines and ordnance are not just a problem in Kosovo, the rest of former
Yugoslavia still has its problems with contaminated forests and agriculture
areas.

~~~
Wicher
Oh yes indeed. When I was cycling (and camping) in the less-often-visited-by-
tourists areas of Croatia and Bosnia in 2011, there were mine warning signs
all over the place. I even had to wait for an hour while a demining team
cleared a roadside so that roadworks could commence.

In the Croatian wars, with its long and hard to guard front lines, the mines
were more or less shoveled out of trucks , with little in the way of
administration. To make matters worse, when the spring floods came and eroded
the riverbanks (the river systems, during the wars, were less well-
maintained), they took the mines buried there with them, and so they ended up
in other places alongside the rivers.

The Croatian government has a GIS webapp up at
[https://misportal.hcr.hr/](https://misportal.hcr.hr/) . I used it to mark my
paper map with a sharpie, so I would know in which areas I'd better not pitch
my tent. The mined areas (in red) viewable through the webapp show the
contours of the breakaway ethnic-Serbian "Republika Srpska Krajina" pretty
well. (The stuff to the far eastern side of the map is the border front with
Serbia and has nothing to do with the Krajina contours).

It amazed me to find these areas still so devastated and deserted. Bombed out
houses everywhere, even in town centres (notably Pakrac), where the young
people I spoke to who were working and living in these scarred towns hadn't
even been born when the fighting started (early 90's, I remember we had a
refugee in our class in primary school.).

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bayesianhorse
Rats (and dogs) still seem to be "state of the art" in the detection of
chemicals.

Both the rats and the dogs scale very poorly, though. Maybe training rats via
AI would improve that? Human labor in Africa is cheap, so automation doesn't
really save wages, but it could improve how much you know about the
reliability of the rats, and thus you could train more numerous and more
reliable rats.

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hughdbrown
This does not give me a lot of optimism:

"Last year, Apopo received international funding of $4.5m (£2.7m) from various
donors and cleared 618 acres of mined land in Mozambique."

There are 640 acres in a square mile, so this is like $5 million per square
mile cleared.

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kewpiedoll99
They are working in lots of other locations besides just Mozambique. They are
also good at sniffing out whether a sputum sample is positive for TB! Check
out their website. I've been giving them money for several years now. They
were featured in an article in the NYTimes
([http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opinion/17kristof.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opinion/17kristof.html)),
a list of different ideas for Father's Day gifts. My dad got a kick out of it.

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DanBC
This idea seems to be taking a long time to be put into use. I read about it
in 2004 - here's an interview talking about rats, dogs, and bees
[http://www.irinnews.org/indepthmain.aspx?InDepthId=19&Report...](http://www.irinnews.org/indepthmain.aspx?InDepthId=19&ReportId=62880)

Here's a page with a bit more information about rat demining including some
video
[http://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00028535.html](http://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00028535.html)

~~~
e12e
Yeah, not surprising though. It's one of those things where 99.9% clear means
a few children blown up every now and then. Having a field with "hardly any
mines" really isn't good enough, so I can imagine it would take a long time to
vet new procedures.

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jjoe
Not so uncommon although this one has the ultimate goal of "detonating" land
mines rather than simply detecting them: "...offered the U.S. forces a large
number of monkeys, some from Morocco's Atlas Mountains and others imported, to
use them for detonating land mines planted by the Iraqis."

Source: [http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-
Industry/2003/03/2...](http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-
Industry/2003/03/24/Morocco-offers-US-monkeys-to-detonate-
mine/UPI-14431048506179/#ixzz320CmlktT)

~~~
e12e
The problem with detonating mines, is that it only gets the ones that works
100%. So you might still have some left with partly broken triggers. Doesn't
mean they won't blow up later, though.

~~~
patio11
UXO (unexploded ordnance) remains a problem quite after the fact. A gentleman
in Virginia became the latest casualty of the Civil War in _2008_ due to a
naval artillery shell.

The house my mother grew up in, and the block surrounding it, had to get
evacuated twice. You wouldn't naturally think Pulaski Street in Chicago would
be a great place to find bombs but you aren't counting on my grandfather, who
twice had a shell land in his foxhole on Iwo Jima and fail to explode.
Believing them to be his lucky charms, he brought them home with him after the
war and put them in his basement, next to his collection of nails.

The CPD bomb squad said, after disarming the second one, "If he has a third
one down here, it is _your_ problem."

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imjustsaying
Far more cost-effective would be cloning ឯកសារ (Aki-Ra).

[http://www.badassoftheweek.com/aki-
ra.html](http://www.badassoftheweek.com/aki-ra.html)

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mjklin
Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist...

