Time To Put On The Gloves: New Fingerprint Technique Spots Drugs

Damnit! Getting away with doing illegal sh*t just got a smidge harder. A new fingerprint technology allows law enforcement to detect traces of weed, cocaine, explosives, even disease and other illnesses.

Using a technique called desorption electrospray ionization (DESI), which involves spraying a finger printed area (like your car door handle) with a solvent and anylizing the droplets that come off of the fingerprint to create a “chemical image” of the finger print.

The result is a higher resolution image of the print than past techniques allowed, give those doing the anylizing the ability to see particles down to one billionth of a gram of “material.”

“The classic example of a fingerprint is an ink imprint showing the unique swirls and loops used for identification, but fingerprints also leave behind a unique distribution of molecular compounds,” Prof Graham Cooks, who helped develop the technology with colleagues at Purdue University in West Lafayette, told the Telegraph.co.uk. Read more