Using powerful vehicle-mounted air blasters, soldiers can search for contact wires by blowing away leaves, sand and soil.
Fire ants, he explained, could build stable tunnels in sand or soil with almost no moisture to bind it together, so learning from them might enable designers to build and programme robots that solve these same engineering problems.
In a stroke of good fortune, this place, Pinehurst, happened to be located in a part of North Carolina known as the Sandhills, because underneath the grass everything was sand, not soil.
Drivers were forced to pull over as soil and sand blew off fields.
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ConocoPhillips said Wednesday that near 1, 695 barrels of oil soaked soil and sand has been recovered so far with about 900 personnel and more than 30 vessels working on the clean up.
The loss of the springs brought with it a loss of the natural filtration of soil and sand, however, so the Maya built their own primitive filtration systems, forcing their rainwater runoff through boxes of sand, the researchers found.
There's a vial of a substance he calls KimSim, a material his girlfriend helped create to figure out how to rescue the Spirit rover after it got stuck in a "sand trap" of alien soil on Mars in 2009.
Before everyone returned to their boats, they each tossed two handfuls of sand onto the narrow mound of soil.
Where there is less sand they, like Mr Serrato, can mix it into the soil, but the mixture does not hold water so well.
"All this heavy machinery and vehicles caused a lot of soil compaction, changed the landscape, and allowed more sand to move and caused a lot of erosion, " she said.
In the vacuum, the sharp edges of the lunar soil cling together, leaving a smooth surface much as moist sand does on a beach.
It has allowed plants, such as early sand grass and various orchids, to pop their heads out of the soil for the first time in years.
The soil consists of a chalk subsoil, topped by a covering of rubble that is made up of sand, lignite, marl, loam and clay.
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