How technology is helping reduce the menace of landmines

village of Nancova, in southern , a team from the , a British mine-clearance charity, watches intently as a drone whirrs back and forth over a nearby hillside. It is searching the terrain below, using a thermal sensor to pick up temperature discrepancies that could spot the whereabouts of landmines laid decades earlier during the country’s devastating civil war.“If there’s an object buried in the ground, it will heat up and cool down at a different rate compared with the soil,” says Michael Nevard, ’s head of research and development. “So if you take the imagery at the right time of day you can see a kind of heat shadow.”