Fingerprinting is a commonly used technique in forensic science. Factors that impact the quality of fingerprints identified at a crime scene include weather conditions, the surface itself, how the fingerprint was left and for how long. This research examines how time and exposure to the elements affect fingerprints on a variety of surfaces. Over a three-month period, different materials were ex...

The Innocence Project defines unvalidated or improper forensic science as: • the use of forensic disciplines or techniques that have not been tested to establish their validity and reliability; • testimony about forensic evidence that presents inaccurate statistics, gives statements of probability or frequency (whether numerical or non-numerical) in the absence of valid empirical data, interpre...

Standards published by the Association of Forensic Science Providers (2009, Standards for the formulation of evaluative forensic science expert opinion, Science & Justice, Vol. 49, pp. 161-164) encourage forensic scientists to express their conclusions in the form of a likelihood ratio (LR), in which the value of the evidence is conveyed verbally or numerically. In this article, we report two e...

There are two groups of offences in this country in which the police have normally sought the help of the medical profession, namely, the various crimes involving violence-such as murder, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm, and the likeand the whole range of sexual offences. Since the establishment during the last decade of government-sponsored forensic science laboratories, help from these...

This short paper introduces a code snippet in the form of an R function that enumerates all possible partitions of a finite set given the sizes of the equivalence classes. Three combinatorial problems are solved using the software: one from bioinformatics, one from scheduling theory, and one from forensic science.

Part I, describes how the NAS Report characterizes “scientific culture.” I suggest that the described attributes of scientific culture are vague and unspecific, and that more thought is necessary to elucidate how they might map onto forensic science. In Part II, I suggest that the NAS Report’s characterization of “scientific culture” is based on popular accounts of science and “the scientific m...

The forensic investigation of hoax, suspected or actual biological weapons attacks, and bioproliferation activities is recognized by biosecurity-advanced nations as an important pillar in a national biosecurity program. Some nations have taken this seriously; most others have not or are not aware of the potential. When law enforcement and forensic science investigations are performed in a coord...

The various classes of human repetitive deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are described, with particular emphasis being given to their variation in the human genome. The significance of this information to forensic science is discussed.

Orthodontists emphasize the importance of facial esthetics while planning a treatment, and orthodontist state that orthodontics have more than expected effects on dentofacial esthetics. The facial esthetics of treated patients and their parents was analyzed and compared to define facial growth and to use in forensic sciences. Our study was applied to 45 orthodontic patients who were treated in ...

DNA was extracted from human and animal bones recovered from archaeological sites and mitochondrial DNA sequences were amplified from the extracts using the polymerase chain reaction. Evidence is presented that the amplified sequences are authentic and do not represent contamination by extraneous DNA. The results show that significant amounts of genetic information can survive for long periods ...