• Waste not, want not: Stockholm burns culled bunnies for heating fuel.
• Helicopters search for radioactive rabbit poop near the Hanford nuclear reservation. Workers to begin removing the poop soon, which might be the worst job ever.
• Mathematician predicts an ESPN fantasy—a Dodgers-Yanks World Series. FOX Sports also has its fingers crossed.
• Doctors enjoy the five-fingered discount by pocking watches, severed hands from hospitals.
• Think technology is invasive now? A new camera is under development that could capture your entire life.
When dead bodies decompose, they release 30 compounds—two of which are appropriately named putrescine and cadaverine. While trained sniffing dogs do a decent job recovering bodies after natural disasters or in crime scenes, scientists are looking into a more automated process—one that would use an electronic device to sniff out any dead bodies in the vicinity.
To build up a database of dead body smells, Penn State University’s Dan Sykes and graduate student Sarah Jones euthanized pigs and created a profile of the odors their corpses produced. The deceased swine were put into a chamber with sensors that contain special fibers to measure the chemicals in the air every six to 12 hours, for one week.
Science Daily reports:
“In days one through three, we found precursors to indole, which is a really good sign. On day three, we found indole and putrescine, the main compounds that we were trying to detect,” Jones says. They now are capturing gases released in a variety of other scenarios to re-construct the different ways human bodies could decompose, creating a more complete picture of decomposition.
Pigs and humans decompose in similar “stages,” and thus have similar signatures of death. The predictable release of the odors also allows researchers to determine a body’s exact time of death. Though, of course, the smell of the cadaver also depends on the environment in which it is discovered. So the researchers will have to test many more environments before this electric nose device can fully take over a dog’s job.
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Image: flickr/ freefotouk
Two Vietnamese men, Duc Le and Sony Dong, were charged this week with eight counts of smuggling. Only the goods weren’t drugs or CDs—they were rare songbirds, which the men carried from Vietnam to Los Angeles. In their socks.
The weirdness went down like this: In March, Dong was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport when an airport worker noticed poop droppings on his socks and feathers popping out of his pants. When the Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors checked Dong’s pants, they found over a dozen songbirds pinned to his socks, each hung like a Christmas ornament.
Millions of birds are illegally trafficked overseas, stuffed inside boxes and bags to be sold on the black market. Dong smuggled songbirds, but other hobbyists specialize in transporting parrots, snakes, and numerous other birds. The global demand for cute, exotic pets encourages criminals to mine biodiverse hot spots for rare species to trade. Despite regulations to keep this from happening, people fascinated with owning their own wild pet fuels the smuggling trade.
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PCs are typically the first place forensic scientists look when they suspect suspicious activity. That’s why many criminals are storing anything they don’t want people to know about on their Xboxes—and, according to authorities, that includes plenty of child pornography.
To combat this problem, computer scientist David Collins at Sam Houston State University developed a tool that can read the game consoles for illegal hidden materials, which he calls XFT. This the first tool designed to read Xboxes for strictly forensic purposes.
The original Xbox hard drive can be modified so that the game console behaves like a PC—and there’s no physical evidence that the system has been changed. While it’s normal for law enforcement officials to confiscate a suspect’s Xbox, forensic scientists must then make a copy of the hard drive to analyze its contents (which is the same process that is used when digging for clues on PCs). Without the interface that Collin’s tool provides, the bit-for-bit information on an Xbox remains buried, unable to be read by current forensics software.
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Jun Wang dumped fuel from his tanker trunk into Little Beaver Creek in Kettering, Ohio. Allesandro and Carlos Giordano, a father and son team, imported and sold cars that didn’t meet U.S. emissions standards. These are just some of the characters on the Environmental Protection Agency’s new “Most Wanted” list of environmental fugitives.
The list is posted on the agency’s website and includes mugshots of 23 people along with their alleged violations and suspected whereabouts. And the EPA wants your help in capturing them. The Web site has information on who to call if you see any of the suspects—it’s usually the Criminal Investigation Division office in the city where they were charged. There are also Wanted posters you can print out.
But don’t, they warn, take green justice into your own hands:
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Look for this in a future episode of CSI: Detectives expose a piece of paper, a shard of glass, or even a scrap of fabric to a chemical vapor, and within hours, dark brown fingerprints appear. Scientists in the UK report a new method of fingerprint detection that makes fingerprints on almost any material visible to the naked eye. But that’s not all: They say the same method can also read a sealed letter without opening the envelope.
Researcher Paul Kelly stumbled upon the discovery while studying the compound disulfur dinitride. His team first noticed the compound’s fingerprint imaging properties on laboratory glassware. When exposed to vapors of the compound, even in low concentrations, fingerprints left on the glassware would stain a dark brown. Residues from the fingerprints were causing disulfur dinitride to form a dark brown polymer.
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Have you seen this child—looking like this? A new study suggests authorities are using the wrong kind of photos to locate missing children. Parents of missing children are usually asked to provide a recent school photo, which typically show smiling, clean, and dressed-up children. But these photos don’t accurately depict the state of kidnapped children (which is what the average missing child would be), who usually look upset, tired, and unkempt.
Researchers at Mississippi State University asked 150 adults to look at photos of children, some in “clean” states and others in “dirty” states. (For the “dirty” states, the children were photographed with makeup to simulate dirt and bruises.) The adults were then shown another set of photos and asked if they recognized the children from the previous photos. People were better at recognizing children shown in similar states, and the advantage became more apparent when the researchers inserted a delay (10 minutes, 3 weeks, 6 weeks, or 12 weeks) between the two sets of photos. This means that even someone who has seen a picture of a missing child might easily overlook the same child on the street.
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Attention criminals: You might want to consider changing your last name to Smith, the most common—and least traceable—last name in both Britain and the U.S. Why? Because men may be carrying a name tag in their genes.
The Y chromosome is passed from father to son with little variation, and in many cultures, so are last names. Researchers at Leicester University in the U.K. seized on this coincidence to study the genetic linkages among British surnames. She found that men who share the same last name, especially the less common ones, are likely to share a common ancestor. This means your Googlegänger is probably a long lost relative after all.
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Will a new brain scan test put an end to lying in court? A judge in India recently used a brain scan to convict a 24-year-old woman of murdering her fiancé.
In a new and controversial way of gathering incriminating evidence, the defendant was read details of her fiancé’s death while electrodes were hooked up to her head to measure her brain waves. Afterwards, the authorities used processing software to analyze the brain scans, revealing that the woman’s brain lit up when she heard information that only the killer would know.
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