Keeping An Eye On Mines

A Japanese nonprofit organization whose members include high-tech heavyweights Sharp, Omron and IBM Japan unveiled Mine Eye on Thursday, a prototype detector that its creators say could make removing land mines safer, faster and more efficient. Tens of millions of land mines are scattered in more than 60 countries. They kill or injure an estimated 20,000 people each year, mostly innocent civilians. The Japanese alliance says the Mine Eye is equipped with ground-penetration radar and a computer that beams an image of the buried object onto a screen and gives the object’s exact depth. That means a deminer can ignore an object that is clearly not an explosive.