The forensic sciences are under review more so than ever before. Such review is necessary and healthy and should be a continuous process. It identifies areas for improvement in quality practices and services. The issues surrounding error, i.e., measurement error, human error, contextual bias, and confirmatory bias, and interpretation are discussed. Infrastructure is already in place to support ...

Forensic geoscience (geoforensics) is the application of earth sciences to receive reality. There is not enough knowledge about geoforensics in Iran, and so, in this paper the best applications are reviewed. Forensic geoscience can be divided to four major groups: pedology, mineralogy and petrology; geophysics; natural geography and geoscience; remote sensing, location data and Geographic infor...

Today, digital forensics (also known as computer forensics) already is a common instrument in forensic investigations. It is due to its massive presence in the media that digital forensics more and more comes to the public mind, too. However, today’s practices and methods are of a more pragmatic kind and a comparison with other forensic sciences shows clear deficits. Those deficits can be divid...

The rise of modern neuroscience is transforming psychiatry and other behavioral sciences. Neuroscientific progress also has had major impact in forensic neuropsychiatric practice, resulting in the increased use of neuroscientific technologies in cases of a psychiatric-legal nature. This article is focused on the impact of neuroscientific progress in forensic psychiatry in relation to criminal l...

Wildlife DNA forensics is receiving increasing coverage in the popular press and has begun to appear in the scientific literature in relation to several different fields. Recognized as an applied subject, it rests on top of very diverse scientific pillars ranging from biochemistry through to evolutionary genetics, all embedded within the context of modern forensic science. This breadth of scope...

1New Mexico Health Enhancement and Marathon Clinics Research Foundation, Albuquerque, NM 87122-1424, USA 2Hard Tissue Research Unit, Department of Biomaterials & Biomimetics, New York University College of Dentistry, New York, NY 10010-4086, USA 3Department of Medical Molecular Genetics, Division of Human Genome and Genome Research, National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt 4Section of Paleopathol...

The present study was designed to describe the evolution of forensic literature in North-American journals over more than 25 years. From 1980 to 2005, the number of articles per year and the average number of authors per article have both increased almost twofold, while the relative contribution of other countries in comparison to the United States has increased from 19.2% to 61.0%. The contrib...

Allelic quantification of STRs, where the presence of three or more alleles represents mixtures, provides a novel method to identify mixtures from unknown biological sources. The allelic stutters resulting in slightly different repeat containing products during fragment amplification can be mistaken for true alleles complicating a simple approach to mixture analysis. An algorithm based on the a...

Aims Micro-CT scanning technology has been increasingly used in various fields of forensic science, however rarely in forensic dentistry. Forensic dentists are regularly confronted with incidents involving high temperatures (e.g. airplane crashes, natural disasters, house fires) and therefore information gained from experimental research can provide useful information for estimating temperature...