Fingerprints Now Recovered From Fabrics

Futuristic movies always have incredibly advanced ways of recognizing and identifying people. Whether it’s with scans as small as your retina or as large as your body, or voice recognition and even taking a saliva sample from freshly kissed lips, it never ceases to impress audiences. But what a lot of people don’t know is that science is more readily available than anyone 50 years ago could have ever dreamed. Instead of having to solve cases by listening to hearsay and trusting the witnesses’ testimony, we have been able to turn to science for the cold, hard facts.

Development

Although this field isn’t perfect, it never stops reaching for more impressive footholds in the study of biometrics. Just recently, experts in the forensic sciences at the University of Abertay Dundee teamed up with the Scottish Police Services Authority to research new ways to gather fingerprint identification from the oil left on fabrics.

Through a technique known as vacuum metal deposition, they can use gold and zinc to recover the fingerprint mark. Although vacuum metal deposition has already been used as a highly sensitive technique to identify fingerprint marks on smooth surfaces such as carrier bags, plastic and glass, the team from the University of Abertay Dundee and the SPSA have been exploring its use in the examination of clothing.

How Does It Work?

This process is carried out by heating up the gold to the point of evaporation, spreading a fine film over all the fabric. Then they heat up the zinc which will only attach itself to the gold where there are no fingerprint residues, thus leaving a grey outline of the fingerprint on the metal film.

Although this research is still very much in its early stages, they are starting to see results. “We have shown that fabrics with a high thread count are best revealing a print and have recovered identifiable fingerprints on a number of fabrics including silk, nylon and polyester,” says Paul Deacon, a fingerprint unit manager at the Scottish Police Services Authority.

Despite the fact that only 20 percent of the public are classified as “good donors” for fingerprint research, this team is making great strides to what will hopefully help take all the guess work out of crime solving.