Blogs / Discoblog

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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