Franklin & Marshall’s weekly online newsletter Searching for
Danger Underground Tim Bechtel, visiting professor of
geosciences Tim Bechtel uses a holographic sensor to scan a test
bed filled with inactive landmines and other objects. It was the
kind of e-mail Tim Bechtel wishes he would never receive. As the
visiting professor of geosciences at Franklin & Marshall checked
his messages one day in late February, he noticed one from his
friend, Titus Peachy, director of peace education for Mennonite
Central Committee. "Tragically, Titus wrote that five children
in Laos had been killed by a cluster bomb on Feb. 22," Bechtel
says. However, the cluster bomb wasn't dropped from an
airplane—at least not recently. The bomb was one of countless
pieces of unexploded ordinance (UXO) buried in the ground in
Laos and numerous other locations across the globe. UXO poses a
serious danger to people, in many cases, decades after it is
dropped. For several years, Bechtel has been working with an
international team of scientists