Thale Cress

“On scrubby flatland outside Copenhagen Airport,” we read, “on old army shooting ranges that have been seeded with land mines,” their biotech start-up company, Aresa, is growing large patches of thale-cress that have been genetically modified “so that its leaves turn red when the plant comes in contact with nitrogen dioxide — a compound that naturally leaches into the soil from unexploded land mines made from plastic and held together by leaky rubber seals.” ❋ Unknown (2007)

You take Aresa's entire supply of altered thale-cress, Kezic's colonies of trained bees, Rigg's bomb-eating mushrooms, and every other pytho-Frankensteins we haven't yet heard about or still inside petri dishes unspliced and awaiting reconstruction. ❋ Unknown (2007)

So: after surveying the weather and cosulting your manual on the wind dispersal pattern, you spray the special spores onto a minefield using a hydroseeder, the same one that groundskeepers to seed green grass on golf courses, and which Ares also used to cover their experimental field with thale-cress. ❋ Unknown (2007)

Locating buried bombs is one thing; rendering them harmless is another, something which the thale-cress and Croatian bees are incapable of doing. ❋ Unknown (2007)

For one, a path will still need to be cleared through a minefield so that thale-cress seeds can be scattered over the land. ❋ Unknown (2007)

But a Danish biotech company has adapted one, the thale-cress plant, to help save lives. ❋ Unknown (2007)