APOPO, a Belgian humanitarian assistance group, is training rats to detect landmines in Mozambique and Angola. The rats are light enough not to trigger the landmines and are able to sniff out landmines with a high degree of efficiency and accuracy.

Researchers at the Geneva demining center have found that Gambian giant pouch rats are ideal "biosensors" for landmine detection. According to one of the researchers, the rats are "almost mechanical in the way they work."

A weed that turns red when it grows near land mines could help clear dangerous fields in war-torn countries such as Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The genetically modified Thales cress is sensitive to nitrogen dioxide, a byproduct of mines, and changes from green to red when the gas is present in soil.

A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect land mines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years.

Futuristic laser weapons under development by the U.S. military are making the transition from fodder for science fiction to reality and could soon be ready to play a major role in protecting troops on the battlefields of the 21st century.

Tiny balls of silica can transform the humble honey bee into a highly effective mine detector, say researchers from the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Sandia researchers announced last year that they had been testing bees\' ability to detect mines. There are about 120 million land mines strewn around the world.