It's already difficult to obtain good fingerprints at a crime scene. In most cases, mostly partials will be found. In cases where there was some type of explosion or fire, other methods like this chemical method could be very helpful not just in recovering the print but also to find out some information on who the suspect could be.

"The body chemistry of the person who left the fingerprint can tell us some things," said Shaler. "If the suspect is older or younger or a lactating mother, for example."The researchers used a form of physical vapor deposition -- a method that uses a vacuum and allows vaporized materials to condense on a surface creating a thin film. Normally, the deposition process requires exceptionally clean surfaces because any speck of dust or grease on the coated surface shows up as a deformity. However, with fingerprints, the point is to have the surface material's ridges and valleys -- topography -- show up on the new surface so analysts can read them using an optical device without the necessity of chemical development or microscopy."This approach allows us to look at the topography better and to look at the chemistry later," said Shaler. "We wouldn't have thought of this by ourselves, but we could do it together."One benefit of this approach would be the ability to retrieve fingerprints off fragments from incendiary or explosive devices and still be able to analyze the chemicals used in the device.The specific method used is a conformal-evaporated-film-by-rotation technique developed to create highly accurate copies of biological templates such as insect eyes or butterfly wings. Both are surfaces that have nanoscale variations."It is a very simple process," said Lakhtakia. "And fingerprints are not nanoscale objects, so the conformal coating is applied to something big by nanotechnology standards."

As you may know, your skin has "normal flora" bacteria living on it. This bacteria is beneficial to your health, but may also be used to identify you, according to emerging research. Scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder are developing a method to identify individuals based on the unique bacteria found on their hands. When the amount of human DNA is too small to detect, bacterial DNA could be used in its place. Bacteria can be collected directly from hands or even touched surfaces and the DNA can be sequenced just like human DNA. The scientists found that very few bacteria were shared among test subjects. Even identical twins have different colonies of bacteria on their hands! Bacteria remain on our hands no matter how many times we wash them, so why not use them?

..."Each one of us leaves a unique trail of bugs behind as we travel through our daily lives," said Fierer, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder's ecology and evolutionary biology department.....unless there is blood, tissue, semen or saliva on an object, it's often difficult to obtain sufficient human DNA for forensic identification, said Fierer. But given the abundance of bacterial cells on the skin surface, it may be easier to recover bacterial DNA than human DNA from touched surfaces, they said. "Our technique could provide another independent line of evidence."...The new technique would even be useful for identifying objects touched by identical twins, since they share identical DNA but they have different bacterial communities on their hands.

"On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch released a report showing that since 1995, only about 20 percent of rape kits, which contain physical evidence obtained from victims, could be confirmed as having been tested in Illinois. More than 4,000 kits had gone untested, the report found."

Law-enforcement experts said iPhone technology records a wealth of information that can be tapped more easily than BlackBerry and Droid devices to help police learn where you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide.

UK experts fear that proposals to destroy so-called "second swab" DNA samples could slow down investigations if and when the UK moves over to new markers and chemistries. Currently, when a DNA sample is obtained from a suspect, a first swab is used to generate a profile in the NDNAD and a second sample is placed into storage. Problems could arise when there was a partial match between a crime scene stain processed using the new markers and an old profile in the database generated using six or 10 markers. Up until now, it would have been possible to re-process the DNA from the second swab, allowing investigators to confirm or deny a match using a comparison based on all the new loci. But soon, that will no longer be an option.