Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/landmine_s
niff_on_the_cheap/  Boffins trial cheap landmine sniff-tech
Technology helps people shocker  By Lewis Page  Posted in
Science, 30th July 2007 12:58 GMT  American boffins reckon they
may have found a way to build landmine-detecting equipment more
cheaply, possibly offering hope to dispossessed people in
warzones around the world.  Landmines are cheap to make and easy
to lay. Once laid, they are difficult and dangerous to clear up:
so much so that minefields often become effectively permanent.
Productive farmland can pass out of use, even when a given
conflict is over, and people lose their homes and livelihoods
forever. It's not so much that the mines can't be cleared, just
that it doesn't make economic sense to do it.  Part of the
problem lies in the cost of detecting buried mines. A lot of the
more modern ones are largely non-metallic in construction,
deliberately hard to find with basic metal-detecting magnetic
gear. There are other methods wh