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. Because bees have statically charged bodies they pick up explosive
particles just as they collect pollen, but the amounts are small, which makes
analysis difficult.
In a separate project the same team had been developing tiny nanospheres with
extensive networks of pores that trap particles and…
