Evidence
New Crime-Fighting Tool: Enhanced Hair Analysis
Posted Feb 26, 2008, 10:36 am CST
By Martha Neil
Experts can now match an individual's hair to the regional tap water he or she has been drinking. That offers a new evidentiary tool to prosecutors and law enforcement, because it can help determine where a person was at the time of a crime.
Thure Cerling, a geologist at the University of Utah whose findings were published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, is one of the researchers who developed the hydrogen and oxygen isotope-matching technique, Reuters reports.
It has attracted interest from police, but it can also be used in anthropology and archaeology, he says. "I also think it will have some interesting applications in wildlife conservation."