Criminals' days may be numbered after Dutch forensic experts discovered how to accurately date fingerprints, a breakthrough that could one day let police date crime scene prints from years ago. "It's not quite the Holy Grail of fingerprinting, but it's a very important discovery," said Marcel de Puit, fingerprint researcher at the Dutch Forensic Institute. "Police regularly ask us if we can date crime scene fingerprints. Being able to date the prints means you can determine when a potential suspect was at the crime scene or which fingerprints are relevant for the investigation." Fingerprints leave nearly unique marks on a surface that can be copied and compared to a database to identify a suspect, a police technique that rose to prominence in the early 1900s. The prints themselves are made up of sweat and grease, including a complex mix of cholesterol, amino acids and proteins. AFP
The dirty business of counting road kill has gone hi-tech, courtesy of a Utah State University team that developed a smartphone application to chart collisions between motor vehicles and animals. The system could help reduce collisions that cause an estimated 200 human deaths and US$8.4 billion in property damage annually throughout the United States, not to mention a whopping one million animal deaths per day, according to Daniel Olson, a Utah State wildlife biologist and lead author of a study released last week in the online publication New York Times
