An Australian research team has come up with a new forensic technique with the potential to allow fingerprints to be lifted from archived crime evidence.
Based at Sydney's University of Technology, the researchers think they've created something quite unique and believe that security forces could find it a very useful crime-solving tool.
Standard fingerprint recovery methods aren't able to lift dry or faded fingerprints but the new technique can. The fingerprint treatment shows up samples of amino acids much more visibly than the current generation of forensic technology. Found in sweat, amino acids are therefore a feature of the majority of fingerprints and, on that basis, they've been part of print-lifting approaches for many years.
However, the new system employs nanotechnology which can highlight a much wider detail range than could been achieved and, armed with their new discovery, the researchers are now hoping to develop it further.
At the very edge of its capability, this nanotech forensic technique could result in a way of getting an impression of the oldest fingerprint off the most difficult surface, like skin.
Fingerprint removal from skin is considered the Holy Grail of forensic techniques and, according to Doctor Xanthe Spindler, the head researcher involved, the new nanotechnology-based technique takes the world one step closer to being able to do it.
"We've been able to successfully target amino acids on non-porous surfaces for the first time, with promising results in enhancing aged and degraded fingermarks that typically give poor results with traditional powdering and cyanoacrylate fuming", she explained, in a statement on the team's nanotech fingerprint lifting breakthrough.
"If we get something that does work really well and is able to enhance prints on old evidence there is always that potential to use it for cold cases and things like that and for older evidence that may have been laying around for quite a while", Spindler continued. "So I think this is something that is really going to push the boundaries, and will hopefully get more fingerprints, better fingerprints and hopefully improve case-solving success rates."
Further details of the Australian research team's fingerprint-lifting development study appear in the current edition of the Chemical Communications publication.
See also:
Companies supplying Fingerprint Recognition Software
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