The article “A New CSI Tool Could Pinpoint When Fingerprints Were Left Behind” by American Chemical Society is about how scientists have found a technique that can help them identify how old fingerprints are. The crime scene investigators on CSI seem to be able to solve a case with a little bit of science and lot of artistic license, but now there is a real-life technique that can help scientists figure out how old a fingerprint is. Law enforcement officials have always relied on fingerprints left behind in a crime scene to solve a case. Finding out how long the residue has been at the crime scene is challenging, but if scientists found out how old the fingerprints were then it would be easier to “rule certain suspects in or out of the investigations.” Researchers have studied certain molecules in fingerprints and found a substance called palmitic acid which “migrates away from print ridges at a predictable rate.” Based on this diffusion, scientists can estimate how old a fingerprint is. These findings only apply to four day old prints, but they are planning to expand it to ten days.
This discovery is very significant. This discovery is letting scientists be able to see how old the fingerprints are which can lead them to rule suspects in or out of investigations. Without this technique it would be a lot harder to rule out suspects of the investigation because fingerprints is what a criminal case can be based on. If scientists do expand the window time to ten days it can really help solve a case in the future.
I thought that this was a very interesting read and discovery. The article was pretty straightforward and easy to read. The article could have been improved by giving some examples of cases that were solved using this technique. Overall, I enjoyed reading the article and thought that this discovery was very interesting.
"A New CSI Tool Could Pinpoint When Fingerprints Were Left behind." ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily, 12 Aug. 2015. Web. 04 Oct. 2015.
3 comments:
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Emily’s current event on the new potential fingerprint technology. It is interesting that scientists are now finding a way to link suspects to crimes using their fingerprints, based off of how many days the fingerprint has been present. Depending on whether or not someone was on at the crime scene or not, that could immediately rule them out of the case, if the weren’t even in town for those days. Emily did a nice job of presenting the current event, with detail and evidence from the text. I would have liked to know more about this technology, like how far it was in its development and what it consisted of. Also how would it have worked? The review could have had more information present and even more detail, seeing that it was loosing interest at points. I enjoyed reading this very much, and liked the topic a lot. This review was well thought out and had good timing with its writing. I learned that, again, technology seizes to surprise me and the advances that we are making as a whole is outstanding.
I think she presented and explained very well why the making of this scientific technique is so important and how law enforcement officials could benefit from using this fingerprinting technique to learn how old fingerprints are. Emily also explained very well what the technique is.
Overall I think her review was great. Some of my suggestions to improve this review is to not repeat things so much. For example she repeated a couple times how the technique can be used to rule out suspects in investigations. Also I would suggest to separate the first paragraph into two because it seemed a little long.
I learned from this article that scientist are today able to learn how old fingerprints are from up to four days. Also what was really interesting to me was how scientist find how old fingerprints are. Scientists are able to do this because of certain molecules in fingerprints, and a substance named palmitic acid which moves away from print ridges at a predictable rate. Based upon this distribution scientists can figure out how old a fingerprint is.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150812131502.htm
"A New CSI Tool Could Pinpoint When Fingerprints Were Left behind." ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily, 12 Aug. 2015. Web. 04 Oct. 2015.
I thought that overall, this current event review was very well done. I thought that Emily did a good job summarizing the main idea of the article. The review conveyed the importance of the article, this appears to be a significant breakthrough in forensic science and I believe that that came across to the reader well. I thought that Emily did a good job at summarizing the article while using vocabulary that is easy to understand for those that are not very scientifically oriented, which is essential for most articles and reviews. Although this review was well written, I thought that the review did not get to the main point of the article until later on, which may drive some readers off. I also thought that there were some minor grammatical errors but for the most part those are insignificant. Otherwise, I thought that this was a very well written review. I was impressed by the fact that forensic scientists are able to date fingerprints by the decomposition of acids in them. I think that it will be a huge breakthrough in forensic science.
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