Bone May Reveal A New Human Group

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/science/25human.html?ref=science

A new species of human may have been discovered recently. A species so rare that all that is left is the fragment of the bone of a child. The child who carried the DNA lineage was probably 5 to 7 years old, but it is not yet known if it was a boy or a girl. The finger bone was excavated by Russian archaeologists in 2008 from a place known as the Denisova cave. Researchers extracted DNA from the bone and reported Wednesday that it differed from that of both modern humans and of Neanderthals. By extraction of mitochondrial DNA, scientists can come to the conclusion that the bone belonged to a distinct human lineage that migrated out of Africa at a different time from the two known archaic human species.

One researcher said at a news conference that before confirming that the child was a new species, he needed to rule out the possibility that it belonged to a population formed by interbreeding between the new lineage and a known species. He said he was analyzing the rest of the child’s DNA, from the main or nuclear genome, to test this possibility.

The artifacts found in the cave in the same layer as the finger bone include ornaments and a bracelet that are typical of modern human sites from the Upper Paleolithic age in Europe. These are puzzling artifacts to be found with a nonmodern human species. But bones can move up and down in archaeological sites, and it is hard to know if the finger bone is truly associated with these artifacts even though there was little sign of mixing in the cave’s layers.

This article relates to forensic science because it uses DNA analysis, anthropology, and dirt analysis to find out more about a particular person.

New Hand Bacteria Study Holds Promise for Forensics Identification

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100315161718.htm

A new bacteria has been found useful in the Forensic Science community. This new bacteria found on both keyboards, mice, phones and other household items can help to identify an individual. This newly found bacteria left behind by our hands contains its own DNA which is not the same within two individuals. This method is also very unique to the crime scene investigation because usually when blood, semen, saliva are needed for DNA testing this new bacteria can help to identify a suspect through the bacteria left behind from skin cells. Although this technique has been proved very useful there are bioethical problems that have been faced due to legal standards on fingerprinting and DNA typing. While there are legal standards for fingerprinting and DNA there are no legal standards for using human-associated bacteria to identify an individual.

Vindication Now Arrives After a Battle of 28 Year

"Vindication Now Arrives After a Battle of 28 Years" is an interesting article about a man named Freddie Peacock who was recently released from jail after five years. He was a churchgoing man from New York who had a severe mental illness and was trying to convince the world that he was not guilty of rape. Mr. Peacock was arrested in July 1976 when a woman who was attacked and raped outside her Rochester apartment building identified Mr. Peacock, who also lived in the building, as the assailant. Peacock's sister, Edith Leonard, explained how for the following 28 years Peacock refused to drop the subject, he would consistently try to tell his family and friends of his innocence. He even begged his parole officer not to release him from state supervision, fearing the action would undermine his many appeals. With barely a comment, Judge David D. Egan of the State Supreme Court in Rochester vacated the 1977 conviction in the face of new DNA testing that proved Mr. Peacock’s innocence. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor directly addressed Mr. Peacock during the five-minute procedure, and neither offered an apology. According to officials, Mr. Peacock was the 250th person nationwide to be exonerated by DNA evidence.





http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/nyregion/05dna.html

“Environmental Forensics” Could Cut the Costs of Brownfield Development

Scientists now believe that with the emerging field of “Environmental Forensics”, it will be easier to prove who is responsible for causes of pollution at contaminated. This could be greatly beneficial in both time and money, as difficult and tedious legal proceedings would no longer be required in order to figure out who is to blame and responsible for paying the legal remediation costs. Brownfield sites hold huge potential for the building and expansion of new businesses, residential areas, and leisure locations, but they cannot be built upon if they are contaminated. This developing field of Forensic Scientist would allow for such expansion faster and with much more ease as well as for the same benefits of projects already under way.

The individual skills that are involved in this budding science (i.e. ecological impact analysis, chemical analysis, hydrology, etc) it is the integration of these skills in tandem, with the legal process, and with the other existing fields of forensic science is what currently hinders its full development.

However, a push is being made to bring this science into more application. The EPSRC is currently working to promote the application of environmental forensic science by focusing on real, live issues an cases. Professor Bob Kalin, who is leading the research program, will delivered his findings at the Queen’s University Belfast festival in September of 2006. He explained how environmental forensics focuses on identifying how and when contamination took place, the contaminations extent and impact, and whether and if there has been any illegal attempts to cover up any contamination. He also outlined specific cases of his findings. In this new age of environmental conscientiousness, this new field of science can only prove beneficial.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060908192920.htm

Murder by the Drop

This article essentially talks all about this book called “The Poisoner’s Handbook” by Deborah Blum. The book details how forensic science has come so far and how New York City played a huge part in that. She talks about how Tammany Halls corruption spilled over into the invention of the modern day coroner. She also talks about how the first coroners would often show up to court drunk and would also take many bribes from various different entities. They would exchange these bribes for falsified death certificates. Under this original system, many murderers roamed free and good men were framed and locked away until 1918, when a new system was put into effect.
This new system was spearheaded by a blue-blooded doctor named Charles Norris, who discovered how to detect toxic substances like Thalium and Radium. Dr. Norris brought about a new and less corrupt body examining system that benefited all parties, except for the guilty ones.
Ultimately, this book is a collection of short stories and how they center around poison and the two detectives who are in charge of finding out who the perpetrators are.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/books/review/East-t.html

To Stop Crime, Share Your Genes

This article talks about the new idea to have the DNA profiles of non-convicted suspects to be put into the DNA database called CODIS. Currently CODIS only contains the DNA profiles of only convicted criminals. Many Americans feel that the proposal flies in the face of one of the major values of the United States which is “innocent until proven guilty”. Also, statistics have shown that African Americans are more likely to be arrested than whites. Critics are now beginning to see this new proposal as a genetic collection that resemble the “Jim Crow’s database”.
A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of “junk” DNA that differs from person to person. This creates a DNA fingerprint for identification.
There are many good and bad aspects to including the DNA profiles of non-convicted suspects to the database. On the positive side, having more profiles in the database will make it much easier for police to find a positive identification of a suspect and link him or her to a crime. Also, with more profiles there will be less of a chance for the wrong people to be convicted of a crime. Also, many feel that having their profile in the database but not being convicted will put their DNA information out for people to see, but since the profile uses the 26 numerical values they are biologically meaningless and only poses identification purposes. Once the profiles are taken the DNA is destroyed so that only the profile on the database is left. The database may also begin to use a technique called a familial search. This exploits the fact the close relatives share substantial fractions of the DNA. The problem with this method is that it is not very exact and sometimes results in a match with people that are not related.
Some of the negatives to this database are mainly that it is genetic profiling. With more profiles of African Americans being on in the database than whites it may be seen as an act as racism. Some ideas to stop this are to have everyone provide a DNA sample and have a DNA profile in the database. With this there will never be any false identification or false convictions since all people DNA will be on file. These DNA samples can be taken when a person is born. Once this biological sample is obtained, its use must be limited to generating a DNA profile only, and afterward the sample must be destroyed and the access to the database must remain limited to law enforcement officers investigating serious crimes.
If the privacy of people remains secure than there is no excuse to use the science that we posses to successfully fight against crime with great accuracy and success. But all must play their part in this fight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/opinion/15seringhaus.html

New DNA method

DNA samples often convict criminals. But many of today's forensic tests are so polluted by soil, tobacco and food remains, for example, that they can not be used. Now researchers at Lund University in Sweden, working together with the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science, SKL, have improved a critical part of the analysis process. This article particularly interesting because of all the work we have been doing with DNA in class recently. according to this article DNA traces have been harder to obtain because of contamination. this article explains how the new methods of doing such things have become easy thanks to leaps in technology.

Police identify body as missing Michigan man

Police have confirmed a body recovered Sunday is that of a Michigan man who jumped to his death from the Blue Water Bridge last November. Lambton OPP say dental records were used to positively identify the remains of 27-year-old John Paquette of Port Huron. His body was located by a passerby on the shore of the St. Clair River in the 600 block of the St. Clair Parkway.An autopsy was conducted Monday at London Health Sciences Centre. The cause of death is inconclusive at this time due to the condition of the body, police said. There were no obvious signs of trauma. Paquette had been missing since Nov. 3, 2009.When he disappeared, Paquette was working as a licensed practical nurse at Yale, Michigan, and had just celebrated his sixth anniversary with his partner.He had just purchased a home, had no financial problems and seemed to be in good mental health, his sister, Christen Nowosislosky, said in November.

http://www.theobserver.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2493599

XBox Forensics

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090430101445.htm

This article was probally the most interesting forensics article. I found it so interesting because it has to deal with Xbox something I find very interesting. A forensics toolkit for the Xbox is described by US researchers in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics. The toolkit could allows law enforcement to search the inbuilt hard disk of such devices and find illegal hidden materials easily. Basically in a shorter explanation the toolkit works like this, the analyst can use shell commands (no idea what those are) to browse the directory tree, open files, view files in hex editor mode, list the contents of the current

directory in short or long mode and expand the current directory to list all associated files. Scientist have developed this tool for the xbox because it is a device that criminal often think will be over looked as a potential place to store data.

North Carolina lab to be examined

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/us/06brfs-CRIMELABTOBE_BRF.html

A North Carolina crime laboratory is going to be examined by two former assistant directors of the FBI. More specifically, its operations in relation to cases dating back to the early 1990s are going to be reviewed. This is happening because recent revelations about practices there led to freedom for man who had wrongly been convicted of murder. The article does not specify what those revelations were, but explained about the case. Last month, Gregory F. Taylor was freed after a three judge panel found convincing evidence that he was innocent. His conviction was on the basis of flawed evidence and unreliable testimony. Taylor had served 16 years in prison before his release.

Vindication now arrives after a battle of 28 years

He had proclaimed his innocence, to no avail, at his trial and sentencing and in his five years behind bars. And when he was released from prison, Freddie Peacock, a churchgoing Rochester, N.Y., man with severe mental illness, persisted in what would become the defining mission of his difficult life: convince the world that he was not, in fact, guilty of rape. “He talked about it all the time,” said his older sister, Edith Leonard. “Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘He needs to let it go,’ because it would constantly eat him up and it worried me.” But for the next 28 years, Mr. Peacock refused to drop the subject, professing his innocence to anyone who would listen: family and friends, those who never doubted him and those who were not so sure. He even begged his parole officer not to release him from state supervision, fearing the action would undermine his many appeals. On Thursday, sitting stoically in the same courthouse where long ago he was convicted of a rape he did not commit, Mr. Peacock, 60, received the exoneration he so passionately sought. With barely a comment, Judge David D. Egan of the State Supreme Court in Rochester vacated the 1977 conviction in the face of new DNA testing that proved Mr. Peacock’s innocence. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor directly addressed Mr. Peacock during the five-minute procedure, and neither offered an apology. Mr. Peacock spoke only once, at the end. “Thank you, Your Honor,” he said. It was not until leaving the courtroom that Mr. Peacock, dressed in a gray suit, was overtaken by the emotion of the moment. He sat down and began to cry. He walked to the courthouse lobby, where the tears resumed and he sat down again to compose himself. “He wouldn’t let this go,” Ms. Leonard said on behalf of her brother, who declined to speak to reporters. “Maybe now he can go on with his life.” Ms. Leonard said she was not sure whether the family would file a lawsuit. “We’re going to get through today,” she said. “After that, I really don’t know.” The Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, a nonprofit group that uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, took on Mr. Peacock’s case after receiving a nine-page, handwritten letter from him seven years ago. The letter contained a plea that easily could have been lost in the disturbed writing surrounding it: “I would like to clear my name.” The Innocence Project said that the decision holds several distinctions. Mr. Peacock was the 250th person nationwide to be exonerated by DNA evidence, according to officials. His request for help was the only entreaty for assistance the legal team had ever received from a person who had already completed a sentence and been taken off parole. The case also nearly triples the record for the most time that passed between a prisoner’s release, which occurred on May 13, 1982, and his exoneration, according to the project’s lawyers. “His spirit to never give up in his quest for justice, it’s remarkable, it’s inspirational,” said Peter J. Neufeld, a co-director of the Innocence Project. “Most people would just walk away from it. Most people would just go on. He made it the single-minded objective of his life to clear his name and say ‘I am not a rapist.’ ” Mr. Peacock was arrested in July 1976 when a woman who was attacked and raped outside her Rochester apartment building identified Mr. Peacock, who also lived in the building, as the assailant. After initially denying involvement, Mr. Peacock, who had received diagnoses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and had not taken his medication in five months, confessed during a police interrogation that was not recorded. Mr. Peacock was unable to provide any details of the crime, including where, when or how it had occurred, and later recanted his confession. A jury convicted him in six hours. Mr. Peacock appealed the case unsuccessfully six times. He was taken off parole in 1992, against his wishes, after years of refusing to be considered for early release. “When he talks about his case, it feels like he’s talking about something that didn’t happen that long ago,” said Olga Akselrod, who handled the case for the Innocence Project. “He knew he was innocent, and to have the system not believe him was very painful. So he kept fighting.” On Thursday, after the hearing and a short news conference, Mr. Peacock skipped his usual Bible study class to attend a small party his sister had planned so he could celebrate with friends who had heard his proclamations of innocence over the years. “I remember his words,” said the Rev. Juanita Sheffield, 58, a childhood friend and the pastor of God’s Holy Temple in Rochester, where Mr. Peacock attends church. He said, she recalled: “I just want my name cleared, even though I served my time and they let me go. I just want my name cleared.”


SUMMARY:
this article is talking about a case that hit really close to home for me. The case is a rape case that had a man who lived in Rochester, NY arrested. However after many years and many failed appeals he was found non-guilty of this crime by DNA evidence. This article was interesting because it showed that even after 28 years a case can be overturned do to DNA evidence.

New DNA Method Makes It Easier to Trace Criminals

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091029155956.htm

DNA samples are often used to convict criminals. However, many of today's forensics tests are polluted so they cannot be used. Researchers are working together at the Lund University in Sweden in order to improve a critical piece in this analysis process. Some of the findings indicate that the new DNA method strengthens DNA analysis so that previously negative samples can now yield positive and usable DNA profiles. As genetic information grows increasingly more common within forensic analysis, the analysis flow starts with taking a sample with a swab from a drinking glass or blood spot. The cells from the swab are then dissolved in water, and the DNA is extracted. The next step is the copying step. This step finds the best chemical environment and replaces a key enzyme with a DNA polymerase. This yields a clearer genetic footprint, or DNA profile, to use. Also, new mathematical models that makes it easy to interpret that DNA analysis are being devises. If the copying phase is improved, stronger DNA evidence can be shown from the crime scenes, which is very important since this can ultimately link a person to a crime scene with greater certainty.

Rapid DNA Sequencing Can Help Doctors Track Cancer Treatment

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered a new way to track a patient's progress with their cancer treatment using a method of rapidly analyzing and decoding large amounts of DNA. They have also discovered that people don't have just one strain of mitochondrial DNA, but several variations that occur in small quantities as well. These discoveries have had a large impact of the scientific community, as they have mad DNA analysis faster as well as rewriting a widely accepted fact about mitochondrial DNA. These discoveries were made by colleagues of Dr. Bert Vogelstein, who is heading a project to try and unlock more secrets of human DNA and other such things. Essentially how the technique works is by analyzing blood for repeating strains of DNA, which (if they repeat a growing number of times) are easily visible markers for cancer cells, and allow doctors to have a better idea of the progress of the cancer treatment a patient is receiving. Dr. Vogelstein's study also showed that there are multiple variations of mitochondrial DNA in roughly 80% of all cancer subjects. But while these progresses are awe-inspiring and astounding, the team working on them will be unable to continue unless the price of DNA typing drops. Otherwise, a full clinical study would simply be too expensive to be carried out effectively.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/science/09gene.html?ref=science

New Sensors for Chemical agents and Drugs

Scientists at Queen's University Belfast are developing new sensors that will detect chemical agents and illegal drugs which will provide aid against the terrorist smugglers and attacks. The new devices will use special gel pads to ”swipe” an individual or crime scene to gather a sample which is then analyzed by a scanning instrument that can detect the chemicals within seconds.

This will allow better, faster decisions to be made in response to terrorist threats.
The scanning instrument will use Raman Spectroscopy which involves shining a laser beam onto the suspected sample and measuring the energy of light that scatters from it to determine what chemical compound is present. It is so sophisticated it can measure particles of a miniscule scale making detection faster and more accurate.
Normally this type of spectroscopy is not sensitive enough to detect low concentrations of chemicals, so here the sample is mixed with nanoscale silver particles which amplify the signals of compounds allowing even the smallest trace to be detected.
Dr Steven Bell from Queen's University Belfast who is leading the research said:
"Although we are still in the middle of the project we have finished much of the preliminary work and are now at the exciting stage where we put the various strands together to produce the integrated sensor device. For the future, we hope to be able to capitalise on this research and expand the range of chemicals and drugs which these sensors are able to detect."
It is hoped the new sensors will also be the basis for developing 'breathalyzer' instruments that could be of particular use for roadside drugs testing in much the same way as the police take breathalyzer samples to detect alcohol.
At present, police officers are only able to use a Field Impairment Test to determine if a person is driving under the influence of drugs. The accuracy of this method has been questioned because of concerns that it is easy to cheat.
To ensure the technology is relevant, senior staff members from FSNI (Forensic Science Northern Ireland) will give significant input into the operational aspects of the technology and give feedback as to how it might be used in practice by the wider user community.
Stan Brown, Chief Executive of FSNI said:
"We consider the work being carried out by researchers at Queen's University extremely important and potentially very useful in driving forward the effectiveness, efficiency and speed of forensic science practice. The combination of leading edge research and hands-on experience of FSNI's practitioners has already proven very fruitful and is likely to lead to significant developments in forensic methodologies across a range of specialisms."


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091005102708.htm