Phages are your friends.

GRUINARD, an island located off the north-west coast of Scotland, was uninhabitable for five decades thanks to a successful biological-weapons experiment. During the second world war, the British army conducted a test involving a flock of sheep and a cluster of bombs containing anthrax spores. The army learned not only that Bacillus anthracis is effective at destroying sheep. It also discovered that the bacterium has the propensity to render land uninhabitable. Only half a century and 280 tonnes of formaldehyde later was Gruinard deemed safe to visit. Thankfully, a quicker, cheaper and more effective means of decontaminating soil infected with anthrax has been discovered. In a recent experiment, Leslie Baillie of the University of Maryland demonstrated that the best way to decontaminate land infected with anthrax is to use the bacterium's own worst enemy, the bacteriophage. In a pilot study conducted in collaboration with America's Biological Defence Research Directorate, Dr Baillie and his colleagues successfully decontaminated soil that was infested with Bacillus thuringiensis, a close but harmless relative of Bacillus anthracis. And although there are few sites that need to be liberated from anthrax spores, it is not exactly a coincidence that the research is happening at a time when the American government is worried about the idea of terrorists launching an anthrax attack.