Wired has a story by Spencer Ackerman about plants being engineered by biologist June Medford to detect explosives. Expect them to be in pots in our airports very soon. An excerpt:

“Picture this at an airport, perhaps in as soon as four years: A terrorist rolls through the sliding doors of a terminal with a bomb packed into his luggage (or his underwear). All of a sudden, the leafy, verdant gardenscape ringing the gates goes white as a sheet. That’s the proteins inside the plants telling authorities that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the guy’s arsenal.

It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. ‘Plants can’t run and hide,’ says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. ‘If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.’”