Thanks to a mixture of materials found in silicon and ground lobster shells, plus some fluorescent dye, police now have a better chance of cracking tricky cases.
Researchers at the University of Leicester in England discovered a new way to dust for fingerprints. They’re using fluorescent nanoparticles. Hopefully, the powder can help police officers identify suspects when only bits of fingerprints remain at a scene. The university’s scientists named the mixture MCM-41@Ch@DnsGly. Catchy, huh?
Law enforcement officers use fingerprints to help uncover the identity of killers, thieves, and all manner of misbehavers. God gave every person a unique pattern on the tips of his or her fingers.
Capturing and studying the marks left by fingers has a long history. As early as 300 B.C., the Chinese used fingerprints as proof of identity. But using fingerprints as evidence to convict criminals came centuries later. For courts in the United States, that began about a hundred years ago.
There are a few ways to classify fingerprints: plastic (formed on soft surfaces like soap or wax), patent (visible, usually because the crook’s hands were covered in a substance such as mud or blood), and latent (invisible without the help of fingerprinting dust).
When looking for latent prints, detectives might cover a surface with a powder. They use different compositions based on the surface they are searching: a light-colored powder like talc for dark surfaces and a dark powder like charcoal for light surfaces. Here’s the problem: Crooks often leave prints in spots where the police don’t look. Or bad guys might try to wipe away the prints. This makes it difficult to find fingerprints with regular dust. Sometimes, criminals are never convicted due to lack of evidence collected at the crime scene.
Nanoparticles may help. These are tiny, tiny bits of dust. You’d need a microscope just to see them.
So, if nanoparticles are so small, how can they be helpful for crime-fighting? Fingerprints are impressions made with the sweat and natural oils from human hands. But once that moisture evaporates, there’s little to cause traditional dust to adhere to prints.
Because nanoparticles are so tiny, they can stick to very small fragments of a fingerprint, even if most of the moisture left long ago. Maybe it helps to think of this like pixels on a computer image. The smaller the pixel, the clearer the image. And the smaller the particle, the more defined the segment of fingerprint.
With nanoparticles, police might be able to uncover truths about crimes that haven’t yet been solved. Unsolved crimes after a time are called cold cases. Cold cases don’t have anything to do with temperature. The trail to find the perpetrator has “gone cold” due to exhausting the available evidence.
But, back to nanoparticles! Though police are not yet using them to dust for prints in actual investigations, there is anticipation that they will soon be on the scene. During tests, nanoparticles produced clear fingerprints about 94% of the time. Developers are still working out a few hiccups, but the discovery is good news for crime-fighters everywhere. Nanoparticles may make police work more efficient in the near future. And they might help revive and bring closure to some cold cases from the past.
When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers. — Proverbs 21:15
Why? Scientists are one step closer to being able to accurately match old or partial fingerprints with their owners. This will help police officers do their job even better.
