Category
Forensic
The CSI Effect: Has Gil Grissom Broken the Justice System?
May 04 2016
According to Entertainment Weekly, crime drama television shows accounted for 13 of the top 50 television shows watched during the 2014-2015 season. The number of viewers thes...
More Sensitivity Requires More Samples
Apr 26 2016
One of the greatest challenges of DNA has been to avoid contamination, specifically trying to avoid the DNA analyst or the person collecting the evidence from leaving their ow...
Returning the Stolen
Apr 25 2016
Argentina is probably not the first place that comes to mind when you think of dictatorships, yet the “Dirty War” of the late 1970s killed 10,000–30,000 citizens in an a...
Autosomal and Y-STR Analysis of Degraded DNA from 120-Year-Old Skeletal Remains
Apr 18 2016
Angie Ambers of the Institute of Applied Genetics (UNTHSC) describes how she processes skeletal remains to determine an individual’s identity, and how she identified a Confe...
Catching a Serial Killer
Apr 11 2016
“Is your life just like CSI?” That is the prevailing question I get asked when someone learns of my occupation as Deputy Sheriff Criminalist for the Contra Costa County (C...
Improving DNA Phenotyping for Forensics
Mar 28 2016
Krystal Breslin describes the work that she’s doing at IUPUI to discover which SNPs determine eye, skin, and hair color in the hopes of making mug shots available to the...
Massively Parallel Sequencing for Forensic DNA Analysis
Mar 21 2016
Massively parallel sequencing (MPS), also called next generation sequencing (NGS), has the potential to alleviate some of the biggest challenges facing forensic laboratories, ...
Familial Searching – An Interview with Rock Harmon
Mar 14 2016
Familial Searching has been getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. In the fight against crime, it is essential that law enforcement is able to use all of the ...
From Death Row to Exoneration Thanks to DNA
Mar 07 2016
Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person in the United States to be freed by post-conviction DNA testing, recounts his story of how he was convicted of a brutal murder, and subseque...