Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has engineered spinach to be fully capable of finding unexploded land mines and buried munitions. Scientists have injected nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes (tiny cylinders of carbon) into the plant, where the information can be monitored on a handheld device. To tell if there are any threats in the area, scientists can wet the plants and shine a laser, such as one on their cell phone with the infrared censor disabled or small laptop onto the plant. By doing so, they can tell immediately if there is a problem in the area and work to disarm the threat. The work was recently published in the journal Nature Materials. Michael Strano, of MIT stated: “Our paper outlines how one could engineer plants like this to detect virtually anything. The plants could…