Scientists have genetically modified mice to enable them to sniff out landmines, the explosives buried just below the surface of the ground. They hope the GM mouse, known as MouSensor, could become a useful tool to help deal with the dangerous devices left from past wars. 

        Although it sounds peculiar, similar efforts have already been made. A Belgian charity uses giant African HeroRats to sniff out the chemical explosive, TNT. Two of these rats can clear an area in less than two hours that would take two people two days to do. One disadvantage of the HeroRat, however, is that it needs nine months’ training before being ready for landmine detection. 

        Scientists wanted to improve on the HeroRat concept by creating a “supersniffer” mouse, MouSensor. They found that a receptor in the lab mouse’s nose is sensitive to the odor of the chemical elements in TNT and landmines. By altering the genes of the mouse, scientists are able to enhance the capability of its receptor 500 times stronger than before. Besides having super sniffing power, the MouSensor is cheaper to manage and easier to breed than the rats. 

        When the MouSensor detects the presence of a landmine, it would have some sort of a seizure and faint because of its extreme sensitivity of the explosives. And this change of the mouse’s physical condition would trigger a chip implanted under its skin to send a signal to a computer monitored by scientists. As a result, the location of the landmine could be identified, and a bomb-disposal expert could go in and neutralize it. The mouse itself would be safe from the landmine, since it would be too small to trigger an explosion.

A study, commissioned by the International Council of Shopping Centers, found that “teenagers in suburban centers are bored and come to the shopping centers mainly as a place to go. Teenagers in suburban centers spent more time fighting, drinking, littering, and walking than did their urban counterparts, but presented fewer overall problems.” The report observed that “adolescents congregated in groups of two to four and predominantly at locations selected by them rather than management.” This probably had something to do with the decision to install game arcades, which allow management to channel these restless adolescents into naturally contained areas away from major traffic points of adult shoppers. The study concluded that mall management should tolerate and even encourage the teenage presence because, in the words of the report, “the vast majority support the same set of values as does shopping center management.” The same set of values means simply that mall kids are already preprogrammed to be consumers and that the mall can put the finishing touches to them as hard-core, lifelong shoppers just like everybody else. That, after all, is what the mall is about. So, it should not be surprising that in spending a lot of time there,adolescents find little that challenges the assumption that the goal of life is to make money and buy products, or that just about everything else in life is to be used to serve those ends.

       The Persian Gulf is not an obvious destination for the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet when Bahrain’sKing Hamad met with Pope Benedict in Rome in July 2008, he 16 a personal invitation to visit. If Benedictaccepts this offer, he’ll become the first 17 to set foot in Arabia.

  18 would make that trip so dramatic is the region’s reputation for religious intolerance. Bahrain’s newhospitality shows that attitudes are changing. And the explanation lies in demographics. The kingdom and its neighborsare hosts to booming new Christian populations, thanks to the region’s 19 hunger for guest workers. Foreignlaborers now represent 35 percent of Bahrain’s inhabitants. The number is 60 percent in Kuwait and 80 percent in theUnited Arab Emirates, and almost half of the 35 million people on the Arabian Peninsula are now foreign-born. Alarge proportion of them hail from Christian areas such as the Philippines and southern India. As a result, 20 now constitute roughly 9 percent of Bahrain’s population. In Saudi Arabia, the Catholic Church estimates thereare 1.2 million Filipino faithfuls alone, making them the country’s third largest immigrant group.