About : standard furniture anthropometry
Title : standard furniture anthropometry
standard furniture anthropometry
claude roux: so my name is claude roux i ama professor of forensic science and the director of the centre for forensic science here atuts. it is with great pleasure that i thank you for coming tonight to attend this fantasticevent. i hope it will be fantastic and listen to what dr xanthe spindler has to say. xantheis a chancellor's post doctoral research fellow at uts within the centre for forensic science.she is also lecturing in the school of chemistry and forensic science. she comes with a very strong background inchemistry and forensic science. she has an undergrad degree, past degree, an honoursdegree from the university of newcastle. then she moved on to do a phd at the universityof canberra in the area of fingermark detection.
but that was done in very strong collaborationwith uts. so we've known xanthe for many years now. she's got a real passion for fingerprints.so i am sure she will share this passion with you. you will see really what i mean. i mean first another thing xanthe has publishedmany, many peer reviewed papers. i don't have the number because we can't really keep trackof all these papers. she's been presenting at a lot of different international conferences.actually next week she'll be at the european academy of forensic science conference inthe netherlands presenting a few papers including a keynote about fingermark detection. personally it's been a great pleasure to workwith xanthe over the last five years. i've
learned a lot of things. first that my organicchemistry is pretty crap and two i could learn what the term coastie, actually means. soplease welcome dr xanthe spindler. xanthe spindler: thank you, claude, so welcometonight everyone and my talk tonight is titled the fingerprint detection revolution. i hopeto take you through a little bit of a history of fingerprints. how the fingerprinting communityactually evolved and then take you some through some of the research and the really excitingstuff that we're doing here at uts at the moment. so the first question i get asked wheneveri tell anyone what i do is, wow, is it really like csi and it's always in that kind of toneof voice. to answer that question well i like
to think that all forensic scientists arekind of sexy, really stylish people. unfortunately we don't go to crime scenes wearing armaniand we don't carry guns around the place. but a lot of the science that you see on tvis based in reality. particularly a lot of the fingerprint techniques that they use onthese shows do have some basis. they may not always get the science right and they mayjazz it up a bit to look really good, give it some production values, but there is astrong basis there in reality. the other question i get asked is why fingerprints?hasn't dna taken over as the gold standard of identification? well that's why we're heretonight and this is why i still have a job is that dna hasn't taken over fingerprintsand why? well first off fingerprints have
a very rapid throughput. we can process fingerprintsquite quickly. the development techniques can take anywhere between, if you're lookingat a powder, say 30 seconds. all you do is get your brush put the powder on and takea photograph. if you're looking at something like supergluefuming it can take up to a couple of hours but even then the identification process isstill pretty quick. dna profiling you actually have to find the stain, cut it out and thendo all of your extraction, your concentration and then do you actual profiling as well.so we can get information very rapidly using fingerprints. we can also maximise our chances of identificationso if we have both dna and fingerprint evidence
we're twice as likely to try and get an identificationthan if we just have one or the other. we also have the potential for intelligence gatheringand i'll talk a bit more about this later on. but basically some of the new fingerprintingtechniques you can actually tell whether a person is a smoker. you can tell whether theyhave been handling explosives or certain types of illicit drugs or whether they've takencertain types of illicit drugs as well. last but not least both of the techniquesare complementary. so in not all instances someone might not leave a dna profile butthey might leave a fingerprint and vice versa. so why fingerprints why are they such a goodtechnique for identifying people? well when you're looking - we're told from an earlyage that our fingerprints are all unique and
that is true. every single person has differentfingerprint patterns. now this is only part of what makes them such an amazing tool forfingerprint identification. it wouldn't be very useful if we had something that was extremelyunique, we were the only person in the world who had that particular pattern but it couldbe easily changed or manipulated in some way to hide our identity. now fingerprints we can actually tick thatbox and like dna as well. we can't change our dna profile the same as we can't changeour fingerprints. well we can at least try there's usually a lot of pain or a reallyhorrific accident involved. even then those scars that are formed in that process thenbecome a tool for identification in themselves.
they are still a unique identifying mark.they're unchanging across the course of our lifetime. the fingerprints you are born withthey form in the second trimester of gestation. so by the time you're about 13 to 24 weeksthrough pregnancy, the foetus has fingerprints already or it's starting to form them. thosefingerprints that we're born with we eventually die with. they might wear down a bit especiallyif you've done a lot of hard labour or you're a tradie. your fingerprint ridges tend towear down over time, but they're still there and they're still the same pattern. they're also very easy to classify. thereare four main types of fingerprint pattern, which we've got up here. we've got archeswhich are one of the simplest patterns but
they're also the rarest. they are only aroundin about five per cent of the population. so if you have arch fingerprints, well done,you are quite a rare specimen, don't go committing any crimes you'll be easy to catch. we also have whorls, we've got loops and asthey sound the names are all classified based on how they look. so a whorl actually folds,spirals in on itself like a snail shell. a loop loops around on itself in the core section.so the core is just the centre of the fingerprint where all those ridges come in together. thenwe've got our fourth classification which is our accidentals. that's basically the catch-allterm for anything that doesn't fit in the other three categories.
they're imprinted on everything we touch sohow do we leave fingerprints behind when we touch something. we don't leave an entirelayer of skin behind when we pick up a drinking glass. so all of you would have left fingerprintsbehind on your wine glasses or your juice glasses when we were having pre-drinks beforethe lecture. we don't leave an entire layer of fingerprints behind. what we leave behindare sweat and sebum. so sweat is that really perspiration thatreally sort of wet sweat that i've got a little bit of now, i'm a little bit clammy, a littlebit nervous. you can also have sebum which is that really greasy sweat. so for peoplewho have oily skin, that's the sebum. now that rubs off on the surface of our handsand whenever we touch something we transfer
that in the shape of our fingerprint ridgesjust like a stamp. this is what we exploit in the case of when we develop latent fingerprints. now it wasn't always the case that we usedfingerprint development. basically a lot of early cultures such as the chinese and mesopotamiansused fingerprints as a way of identifying each other. they tended to stamp their potterywith their fingerprints in order to identify who made a particular item. now as with alot of knowledge from the ancient world this was lost in the dark ages. french authoritiesused to brand their prisoners in order to identify them in the middle ages. now you can imagine that fell out of favourquite quickly and as policing and forensic
investigation started to evolve in the victorianera we started to look at other methods of identifying prisoners within the prison systemitself. now these weren't methods to identify offenders. they couldn't go out to a crimescene as such and identify someone in particular. but they could use it to say oh this personhas been incarcerated before this is their second offence or this is their fifth offence,we've got a record of them already. so in 1880, 1881 alphonse bertillon determinedthis method called anthropometry. basically shown here they used to use measurements andphotographs of a person's basic body measurements. so the length of their arm to the tip of theirfinger, pretty much any sort of standard height measurement, also measurements around theface. you can kind of think of this a very
crude precursor to a lot of the biometricsystems like facial recognition that we use today. now this was standardised in 1881 by bertillonand a lot of places used to use this or a lot of jurisdictions used to use this to identifytheir prisoners. now basically around this time a few other people decided that fingerprintingmay not actually be the best method, sorry the anthropometry system may not be the bestmethod of identifying people. so we had five researchers here across the globe situatedin japan, india and in england and argentina, looking at whether you could use those fingerprintridges, those fingerprint patterns in order to identify prisoners.
it was dr henry faulds and sir william herschelthat really did a lot of the legwork at the start to really identify whether fingerprintsare unique and whether they stay the same across the population. you can imagine theamount of data they had to collect to do that. it was a monumental task. now it was aroundthis time that sir henry galton got involved with the help of charles darwin. basicallythey started to look at identifying, writing this book here, finger prints, which is atext book that we still revere today. this is a photo of us revering said text book ata conference last year, the international fingerprint research group conference in sweden. lisa, could you just go check what that wasabout?
now around this time an argentinean researcherjuan vucetich started to look at whether they could use fingerprints to identify the prisonersalready in the argentinean system. around the same time galton was tirelessly tryingto get the english authorities and scotland yard to sort of come on board and to talkabout fingerprints. he managed to get them to at least think of it as a complementarytechnique to anthropometry. so you've now got all of your body measurements your photographsplus the fingerprints of the prisoners in the system. now in 1984 there was a rather brutal murderin a small county in argentina. a man had attacked a mother and her two small children.the two children died. now he left many, many
blood soaked fingerprints at the crime scene.back in these days fingerprint powders which we kind of think as the fall back for fingerprintdusting and fingerprint enhancement weren't actually all that common. they were aroundbut they weren't really known about and weren't used. so they were really reliant on having somesort of colour contamination on the skin in order to photograph those fingerprints andto see them. now the suspect had denied and denied and denied that he was involved. theyfinally took his fingerprints and when they compared them to the marks in blood that theyfound at the crime scene they eventually convicted him. it was at that point that fingerprintswere starting to be used in argentina as form
of forensic evidence in their own right. theyhad now moved as a way of identifying prisoners to identifying offenders at crime scenes. meanwhile back in england, galton was stillfighting pretty hard to get fingerprints used as a piece of forensic evidence. the 1900sdealt two major blows to the anthropometry system and these were the two death blows.the first was a robbery of a set of billiard balls. yes billiard balls on denmark hillin england. the crime scene investigators found many dirty marks, fingerprint impressionson a window sill that the thief had used to enter and exit from the building. they identified these to be from an offenderknown as harry jackson who was known to police
for other offences and he now has the dubioushonour of being the first ever person in the commonwealth to be convicted on the basisof fingerprint evidence. the other death blow was an unfortunate incidence at fort leavenworthprison in the us. a young man by the name of will west was taken to fort leavenworthand convicted, or was charged with several crimes. now he had again denied that he was involvedin anything else. when they took his measurements took his photographs they found that he was- that he'd already been in the system and started to question him about prior offences.now again he denied he'd been involved in anything, this was his first arrest. how couldhave he done any of these other crimes that
he was purported to do. the prison officersdidn't believe him, they thought it was just a case of another convict being coy aboutprevious offences to try and get a lighter sentence. he also matched the name of william west whowas already in the system. the problem here william west was still incarcerated in theexact same prison. at this point countries started to abandon the bertillon system. wewere the first to set up a fingerprint bureau i 1903 and new south wales had already takenthe measures the year before to start introducing fingerprinting in the prison system. victoria,queensland, south australia, tasmania - oops, what have i done there? hello, ah there wego, technology it's a wonderful thing.
so new south wales and victoria, queenslandand south australia, tasmania, western australia, the northern territory and then the act, onthe bandwagon right at the end followed suit and set up their own individual fingerprintbureaus. the act to be fair to them were probably under the umbrella of new south wales policefor quite a long time. okay, so who stole my wine bottle? did anyoneactually see the thief? yes, no? well lisa has kindly chased down two potential suspectshere. so girls, they're both students. i understand i've been an undergrad before i know whatit's like to be desperate for a bottle of red. so who here thinks it was claire here? unidentified speaker: yes of course it wasclaire.
xanthe spindler: who thinks it was leanna?so it's very hard to see from up here. but okay so we've got a few people. who doesn'thave a clue at all? the majority of the audience, nicely done. okay so we can't separate thesegirls based on their measurements. they're both very similar height, they're very similarbuilds. they're both wearing the same clothes. if we were to basically use just the bertillonsystem we wouldn't be able to identify who stole that wine bottle. also using eye witnessaccounts, again we can't identify who is who because it happened so quickly, it was dark.you can't really tell them apart. now there are two ways we can identify a person,the first is dna profiling. unfortunately you can see here i don't have any dna profilingequipment with me. so i'll have to go with
a much better method fingerprinting, sorry,biologists, sorry, tamara, i'm biased. can you please thank our lovely suspects here? [applause] xanthe spindler: thank you, girls. okay sosafe work practices and to protect the evidence i shall glove up. now powders have been aroundsince 1891 so they've been around for quite a long time and in fact before fingerprintswere used as a forensic tool. they were very much concoctions of your own devising. therewere no standard recipes. you couldn't go to a forensic supplier like we do these daysand buy a specific powder that you like. most of them consisted of pretty much anythingthat would adhere to fingerprint ridges. that
was the only criterion for making a good fingerprintpowder. soot, which is the base of a lot of earlyfingerprint powders is still used today and the black powders that are commercialisedare still made primarily of soot. so what i have here is a fingerprint powder knownas blitz-green, as the name suggests it's a lovely green colour. this is a magneticpowder so we've also got magnetic iron particles in here which makes it much easier to apply.most of the powders that you may be used to seeing are applied with just a standard brush.they are good but you can damage the print if you are a little bit heavy-handed. in our labs we tend to find girls are quitegood at applying the fingerprint powders as
a general rule because they're used to applyingfoundation and using a feather touch. the boys on the other hand, it's really a 50/50bet as to whether they're going to wipe their evidence off the surface the first time theydo it or whether they are going to get a usable print. so i've got the bottle here, i'm justgoing to take some of my powder trying not to spill it everywhere and just brush thatover the surface and try and find some fingerprints. ah, i've got lots and lots of fingerprintshere. okay ooh, this is actually live, folks, you can tell because it's a not so delicateprocess. okay so i've got a few fingerprints here that might be quite useful. but it'squite hard to see because of the colour of the bottle itself is green. we've got a greenpowder and obviously from a distance it's
quite difficult for you guys to see. now if we want to improve contrasts thereare a couple of different methods we can use to really bring up those ridges. the firstis to just use different angles of light and different coloured filters to try and blockout the background so we get really dark ridges on a bright background or really bright ridgeson a dark background. the other thing we can use is something called luminescence. nowwho here has seen one of these before? yes, it's a typical glow stick. now you cansee here it's got some colour just as a visible colour itself. if we want to make that easierto see we snap it, mix the two chemicals in here together, give it a shake. a handy hintfor those of you still doing high school chemistry,
shaking things makes reactions go faster.so now you can see that's much brighter than what it was before i'd mixed those two together. now this is a specific form of luminescencecalled chemi luminescence. so there's two chemicals mixing to form a reaction, whichthen gives off light as a by-product. the method we're using today is just - it's aslightly different form of luminescence. so what you do is you shine a light source ontothe powder and what the powder does is it absorbs that light and then emits light alonger wavelength. so if i'm shining green on there it should emit around the yellowregion of the spectrum. again you need the right tools in order tosee this, science is sexy, right? if you do
that you can see the marks luminesce. i amnot just going to let you take my word for it, but if we take one of the fingerprintsfrom the bottle, you can see it's quite a nice fingerprint. we've got good ridge detailthere. we should be able to get an identification. there is a bit of a problem with curved surfaceslike bottles. you can get some distortion in the ridges but they're still identifiable. so here we've got a whorl pattern, you cansee the core of the fingerprint spirals in on itself like that snail shell pattern. we'vegot these two triangular regions here where all the ridges meet and then diverge. theseare known as deltas. it is these two points which are the first basis for a fingerprintidentification. now if we have a look at leanna
our first suspect's fingerprints she has predominantlycentral pocket loops. so this or double loops so this pattern where you've got two loopscurling in on each other and also arches. so like i said, leanna shouldn't really gocommitting any crime. she's actually a very small sub set of the population. we can immediately exclude her as the suspectbecause she doesn't have any whorl patterns in her fingerprints. now if we take clairefor the other hand we've now got three whorl patterns that could potentially be hers. sohave a look at these two in more detail. we've got the same basic core structure and thetwo deltas are in the same place. we've also got many different bifurcation points so wheretwo ridges will meet into one or one ridge
will split into two, depending on which wayyou want to look at it. you can also see from the general flow ofthe ridges, now again taking into account that there is a little bit of distortion becausewe are looking at a curved surface. so we're not looking at a flat fingerprint put downlike in this exemplar here. there is a little bit of distortion because of the grippingof the bottle. but pretty much from the flow of the ridges, work it out. look at the minutiaewhich are those individual points and they're what's randomly formed and that's what weuse for identification. so from that we can pretty much work out that it was claire thatstole the bottle. we'll forgive her this time round, okay. nowfor decades powders remained the only way
for enhancing fingerprints. so we're talkingfrom 1903 through to about 1954, pretty much the only thing you had to use were powders.now in the early 1950s two scientists, odã©n and von hofsten came up with an ingeniousidea, like all scientific advances, which was equal parts brilliant thinking and serendipity. they were studying a chemical known as ninhydrinwhich is used for detecting and measuring how much amino acid or how many amino acidsare in a particular biological sample. for about 40 years before they'd started theirresearch biologists had been writing in all their notes, please wear gloves when usingninhydrin. any paper equipment that you work with such as filter papers or chromatographyplates will develop your fingerprints if you
touch them before adding ninhydrin to theexperiment. now it wasn't until the 1950s that odã©n andvon hofsten thought, ha, i wonder what's actually causing these mysterious fingerprints to startpopping up whenever we touch these filter papers without gloves. they started testingthis. this example here is of a ninhydrin developed fingerprint and pretty much anypaper surface that you've touched whether it's a fraudulent cheque, allusions to, idid say i wasn't going to mention the mickleburgh case. but since it has been on tv recentlythe perth mint swindle, part of their central evidence was a fingerprint on a fraudulentcheque enhanced with ninhydrin. it wasn't faked, don't believe the movie.
so from then on, 1954 was really the catalystpoint for fingermark detection or fingerprint detection to take off as a discipline in itsown right. from there we started seeing the development of techniques such as super gluefuming. so basically any of you who have used superglue or ethyl cyanoacrylate to give itits proper chemical name will know that when you allow it to set in air it forms this reallyhard white polymer. now if you vaporise that so you heat up toabout 80 degrees and you place it in enclosed chamber with something such as this smileyface ball here or a bottle of water or the bottle of wine. you allow those cyanoacrylatevapours to deposit, to flow through, they will actually deposit in the fingerprint itself.it prefers the sweaty components in the fingerprint
and then it will start to harden into thatwhite polymer. now we can also, if there is not enough contrast,say for example you've got a clear bottle and a little bit of a white polymer forming,it's not very visible to the naked eye, you can't get a good photo of it. we can thenadd stains. this is an example of a stained fingerprint developed with cyanoacrylate uphere. now the australian national university have also left an indelible mark on the forensiccommunity. has anyone here heard of a little invention called the poly light? there's afew people. it's basically a box - it weighs about 12kilos, it's about that big. it's a forensic light source. it's been made famous a fewtimes by shows like csi. basically we can
see anything, form any light or use any lightfrom the uv, the ultraviolet all the way through the coloured spectrum up to the infrared.now this was actually the result of research done at anu in the eighties. the other thingthat came out of it was an adaptation to the ninhydrin method. this is one of the researchersfrom the anu group back in 1984. basically what they looked at was adding zincsalts and cadmium salts to the ninhydrin reaction. this gave them a better result. it allowedthem to see fingerprints that may have been quite faint using ninhydrin and basicallythese now suddenly appeared. they were now suddenly usable evidence. although it looks like from this that we'vegot a fairly comprehensive suite of fingerprinting
techniques. there are fingerprints that stillaren't captured by these techniques. we're still missing evidence and frankly that'snot good enough. some fingerprints may be too weak, so someone may have very dry skin,they don't have enough sweat there in order to leave a good fingerprint that we can detect.maybe they haven't touched the surface thoroughly enough or hard enough in order to get transferof the fingerprint ridges or the fingerprint detail onto the object. maybe the object is just too old, it's beensitting in the cold case storage for 40 odd years. maybe we just can't get a fingerprintoff it anymore because it's been and gone. now as a result we're constantly having tosearch for better techniques, more sensitive
techniques in order to get usable fingerprintsoff old, damaged or very weak evidence. this is where it gets complicated. our sweat andby extension the latent fingerprints that we leave on objects are made up of thousandsupon thousands of different chemical compounds. now you can imagine this makes it quite difficultin order to come up with a technique which will work that is robust. that will work ina lot of cases or the majority of cases. now when a crime scene investigator goes intoa particular scene the fingerprints are latent. they are invisible they don't know where theyare. much less they don't actually know what the chemical composition is at the time theygo in there. they don't know how old the fingerprints are.
basically our mission statement is to comeup with new techniques that allow us to see these fingerprints that work in the majorityof instances or hopefully in all instances. it sounds simple, right? the challenge isto work with something that is so minute down to a billionth of a gram of material. we'vegot to try and target that in place so that we're not pre-concentrating the sample ortaking it off the surface. usually when chemists do analysis of very low concentrations ordetection of very low concentrations, they'll extract it from whatever matrix or whateversurface they're looking at. they'll then pre-concentrate it to the smallestpossible volume and then analyse that so that they get as much material as they possiblycan to analyse. if we did that to a fingerprint
we'd actually be basically a lost cause. wewould have to destroy the fingerprint in order to make it a stronger signal. so not onlyhave we got to work with a very low quantity, we've got to do it without destroying theridge detail. how many of you are fans of shows such ascsi? what about ncis? not as popular, what about bones, fairly popular, okay. now thefingerprint detection methods that they use in these shows aren't actually as robust anddon't give us quite the same results in reality as what they do on these tv shows. like isaid they need good production values in order to make it watchable, in order to make itentertaining. even we're not immune to the sexiness of these techniques that they useon tv.
we want to be able to do what they do. wewant to be able to get the results they get. this is the real vmd, this is the real vacuummetal deposition apparatus. this takes up its own room in a standard police lab. it'sso loud that even with the door shut you can hear it at the other end of the building.now basically the description they gave was fairly accurate. it does use gold, it doesuse zinc and they are vaporised using an electric current. the gold deposits first and then the zincdeposits on top of that. unfortunately we can't quite get the same results that theygo there. now vacuum metal deposition is a really handy technique. it is expensive andit is cumbersome to use but it gives us some
really good results. say for example for polymerbank notes. when the reserve bank changed the australian currency over to the polymerbank notes from the paper currency that we used to have, forensic scientists everywherestarted banging their head against their benches. basically the polymer bank notes are reallyhard to get good fingerprints off. they're a really bad surface, they are what we callsemi-porous. they are not quite porous so we can't use techniques like ninhydrin onthem. they're not quite non-porous. so cyanoacrylate fuming which we would usually use and powdersdon't work quite that well either. it's kind of that in between and it gives some reallyweird results. the other problem we've got is you can see the printing is still visible.
so this has been developed with cyanoacrylateand then a stain called rhodamine added to the top of it. you can still see that the$10 insignia and some of the printing, intaglio printing which is actually raised. if youfeel the surface of the bank note all of that black printing is slightly raised from thesurface. if you use vacuum metal deposition, slightly different lighting conditions youcan get quite good results. you get rid of all of that or the majority of that backgroundto get a usable and identifiable fingerprint. now this was work that was done by naomi jones,now naomi [spiers] during her phd thesis here at uts. this work has continued recently,an honours' student of mine from last year tristan merten was looking at the use of singlemetals rather than the gold zinc, looking
at using just silver or just copper. basicallywhat he found is that these single metals give comparable results in some instances.silver is quite good but then just as a failsafe he can then apply gold, zinc, the standardvmd technique afterwards. so basically we like sequences, we like tobe able to say okay so if this technique doesn't work, it doesn't give us a usable fingerprintwe can move onto a better technique and not destroy the evidence and just keep going untilwe get a result. you can see here results on fabrics as well. so part of tristan's projectwas to look at whether we can get identifiable fingerprints off fabrics. in the case of nylonit's actually quite feasible. nylon and polyester they don't absorb watervery easily so they don't absorb fingerprint
residues or sweat very easily either. if you'relooking at something like cotton you're going to get all of that moisture absorbing in.after about an hour all you end up with is a hand shaped or a finger shaped blob. eventhen after quite a while with these nylon and polyester you're still going to lose thatridge detail after a couple of weeks. so unlike what they can do on bones, we can't actuallyidentify just a random fingerprint or a random hand print on fabric just yet. some of the other research that we've beenlooking at is down to the scale of nano-powders. now most of the powders that we use at themoment, the particles are a few micrometres wide so basically a millionth of a metre ora thousandth of a millimetre across in diameter.
what we are now looking at are nano-particles.so things that are a degree or order of magnitude smaller than that. the whole idea behind thisis that the smaller you go ridge, fingerprint ridges themselves are only quite small. soif you have a small powder a very fine powder deposited on that fingerprint adhering tothat fingerprint the smaller the particles the better definition that you get. again this is an example of some work thatwas done by mi jung choi again another former phd student of uts. this particular examplehere was a zinc oxide powder that was doped with lithium. so taking ideas from the materials'world so building things such as better semiconductors and basically applying that in a fingerprintingcontext. this is a lovely little micrograph
of the powders on the fingerprint ridges themselves.she also looked at using other types of nano-particles, so titanium dioxide, which allows you to getfluorescent ridges. so we're looking at the development of fluorescentnano-powders or luminescent nano-powders as opposed to just coloured powders. we've alsogot magnetic powders so zinc oxide with our iron magnetic particles in them that can beapplied with this style of brush here. again instead of using the standard squirrel hairbrush.that was performed by a german research intern that we had a couple of years ago, ron [yerog]. this is something very close to my heart,this is actually part of my phd work. so not only are we trying to develop new techniquesfor fingerprint analysis, or what i like to
refer to as conquering the world. we're lookingat trying to understand the world. trying to understand what's actually going on ata molecular level. reaction by reaction, atom by atom, trying to work out why in some instanceswe get really, really good fingerprints and in others you can barely see the ridges atall. one of the methods that's quite regularlyused these days is known as indanedione-zinc. this is the little sister of ninhydrin. itreacts in a very similar way it's used in the same instances but it's much more sensitiveto the climate. so we were finding that even though we were getting really good resultswith this here in australia the us were getting really good results and so were israel.
places like the united kingdom, canada andeven new zealand were getting quite poor results with indanedione-zinc. for years and yearsand years we couldn't understand why. this saga has been going on for 15 years and it'sonly just starting to be resolved now. so basically trying to understand how to go fromthis, which is a very poor result, to a nice, bright, good yield of - or good fingerprintdevelopment. basically what we're finding is that once we understand these reactionswe can say okay so you've got a really dry climate, there's not a lot of or it's below20 per cent relative humidity, really, really cold, you need to this in order for this reactionto work. oh you have this type of paper, oh you should use this technique instead. it'snot really feasible to use this one.
now one of the other things and this has beenin the media recently that's come out of uts is looking at something known as the thermalfingerprint device. if you - there were two research students again honours' students,adam brown and daniel sommerville back in about 2006 who determined that if you heatedfingerprints in a certain way. so you just put fingerprints on paper in a heating pressor under an iron for a particularly - anywhere between about i think it was two minutes throughto about five minutes, you actually got this charring of the fingerprints. so you get brownfingerprints on a white background. now when they did it for shorter periods oftime at very high temperatures, so for example 30 seconds at about 220 degrees they weregetting these fluorescent ridges here. no
chemicals or no actual reagents or processinginvolved, just heat. so we thought, okay we're onto something here and so did foster + freeman.they've now marketed, this is the second generation. basically what this relies on is that thesweat in your fingerprints causes this - degrades rapidly at high temperatures compared t thepaper itself. so you end up with this difference in the thermal degradation or the charringand burning of the fingerprint ridges compared to the paper. this is really, really useful in instancesof covert operations. so for example if you intercept something during an intelligenceoperation, you want to be able to identify fingerprints on that evidence but you don'twant it to be visible when you put it back
into circulation. now if you use a standardtechnique which gives you a colour reaction so ninhydrin and indanedione both give youvery brightly coloured fingerprint ridges once you use them. you want something that'scovert, you can just stick it back into the system no one is any the wiser that you'veactually done anything to it. the tfd gives you these luminescent prints.you can't actually see any difference if you look at it with the naked eye. as i mentionedit was the new release of the second generation has been in the paper recently. sometimes we just need to look to the otherend of the rainbow. most of the techniques we use look at around the violet to the greenregion of the spectrum. so we're looking at
the high energy part of the spectrum. a lotof other substances actually luminesce at the same wavelengths. say for example thebarcode on a fanta can, you can see here using something that has - that gives you a lightemission around the yellow region, you can see that the barcode is actually interruptingthat fingerprint detail. now if you have a look at something like acoke can or any sort of soft drink label under something like the poly light, it doesn'tmatter what wavelength you choose that thing is going to light up like a christmas tree.this makes it particularly difficult to get fingerprints off this kind of evidence. sowhat we need to do is actually look to a different part of the spectrum towards the red and thenear infrared in order to get a good fingerprint
development. so this particular example here is somethingcalled star 11 and this is from a finishing phd student this year by the name of scottchadwick. basically what he's done is combined two different dyes, styryl 11 which is a nearinfrared dye, it emits just on that cusp of the red and the invisible part of the spectrumand rhodamine which is a common stain. it's that stain on your left that emits in theyellow region of the spectrum. what you can do by combining two dyes is that where therhodamine emits light so it's absorbed in the green region of the spectrum. we've shonethe green light on it, it then emits in the yellow. the stryrl 11 actually absorbs thelight from the rhodamine and then emits in
the near infrared. so what we've done is doubled that gap betweenthe light that we're shining on the sample and the light that we're actually viewing.this gets rid of the a lot of the background interferences. so we can actually view morefingerprints on really difficult surfaces. the first method he tried was just using itas a stain for cyanoacrylate fuming and since then there's been a fair bit of work doneon this for powdering on difficult surfaces. so this example here is on a laminate benchtop. the good quality fingerprint is the star 11 combined with titanium dioxide. the reallypoor quality print is actually blitz-green. it's the same thing we used on the glass.now it performs really well on smooth surfaces
and a lot of the traditional powders workreally, really well on those smooth surfaces like glass. as soon as you introduce sometexture things such as a laminate bench top you start to get really bad results. that'swhy we need to start looking at new powdering methods. it's also looked as a method for getting fingerprintsoff the sticky side of tapes. now you're probably thinking why would we want to do that? caseswhere someone has been bound with tape, a package has been bound with tape you can sortof see where this is going. the sorts of things that you could package up with tape that youdon't actually want to be found by police or customs. these things do need to be analysedand the better the method you've got for getting
those fingerprints from that evidence themore likely you are to get a conviction. now taking that one step further, now we'renot just looking at the opposite end of the light spectrum, we're actually looking atthings slightly backwards. this is work done, you'll have notice the insignia there forthose of you who are quite astute is actually part of a bank note. you can see the australiawriting down the side. from memory this was a $5 note. when you - this came out of somework by elicia bullock. what she found was when she used a particulartype of powder called an up-converter that she could get really good ridge detail fromfresh fingerprints off these polymer bank notes. now how does an up-converter work?i said we're doing things slightly backwards.
so instead of shining our light source atthe short end of the spectrum and moving to a longer wavelength, we're actually doingit the opposite way. an up-converter takes a long, low energy wavelength of light andthen emits a shorter high energy wavelength of light. so in this there's very few things that dothis naturally. basically you have to make up-converters in the lab. you can't find anup-converter in the commercial environment. you can't find it in the natural environment.so what we've got here is a method that can eventually get rid of background stainingor background interference with no real hassles. so this has been continued throughout rongliang'sthesis and you can see with standard techniques
again cyanoacrylate fuming, very poor ridgedetail on the left. as soon as you use the up-converter you can start to see the ridgesand you're getting very minimal disturbance from that background. so you've now got usableevidence where you couldn't get usable evidence before. again you might recognise the name on thisslide. taking the next step and this what relates directly into my current work hereat the university. now what we need to do is really focus on a non-chemical techniquein order to get the next generation of fingerprint reagents. most of what we look at involveschemical reactions. you're taking one component reacting it with another to get the same amountof another component.
what we want to do is take one component reactit with something, or detect it with something and then get a signal that's 10, 20, 30, 40-foldgreater than that original amount of material. so you can see where this might come in handy,really weak fingerprints. if you've got very little sweat there to begin with you wantsomething that's going to give you the best possible visualisation. you want somethingthat's going to give you a very strong signal for not much starting material. now this all came out of some talks with acolleague in the us by the name of oliver hofstetter. basically we contacted him andsaid, hey we're interested in some of your research. we've just found out that you'vemade antibodies. so the same proteins that
are responsible for keeping you healthy, partof your immune system, they're what attack germs, viruses, any sort of illness to keepyou nice and healthy. he'd actually raised some to target aminoacids which are a natural component of your sweat. now he basically said, here, have acouple of grams, see what happens. we're still in contact with him, we still work quite closelywith him. what we found is when we combine these with nano-particles and then put againa luminescent tag on them we're actually getting fingerprint ridges. it's pretty exciting especiallyconsidering this was the first time we'd been able to get amino acid rich fingerprints onglass. usually you use or you target amino acidson porous surfaces because they tend to be
more stable. we've managed to do it on a nonporous surface which was pretty exciting. i think from memory there were cartwheelsdown the hall when that happened. last year the media finally got hold of it. for thoseof you who listen to bbc media, you may remember me stumbling across my words on radio, whichwas kind of exciting and kind of frightening at the same time. since then we've actually had a spin off projectstart. michael wood, again another finishing phd student, who's been looking at the useof aptamers. now aptamers can kind of be thought of as synthetic antibodies. they're made upof dna rather than proteins but they do the same basic job. he's got some really, reallygood results. these are hot off the press
that he's presenting next week at the europeanacademy of forensic science conference. i'm slightly miffed and slightly proud at thesame time that his fingerprints look better than mine. so what does the future hold for fingerprintdetection? where do we go from here? this was just a snippet of some of the researchthat's out there. there's been work on new ways to detect blood marks, so not just lookingat photographing them. what do you do with blood marks that might not be quite visible?they're really weak, there's only a little bit of blood on them. looking at techniques which give you really,really fluorescent fingerprints or really
luminescent blood fingerprints. a lot of thecurrent techniques you can get some ridge detail, but they're not fantastic, they couldbe better. there's also research that's been going on recently at looking at techniquesthat not only detect blood but can also detect the latent components. so the non-blood componentof the fingerprint at the same time. when we use these you can actually tell thedifference, what's blood, what's latent. so not only can you photograph them you can thendo a targeted dna recovery from the blood portion of the fingerprint. i mentioned rightat the start of the talk for those of you with good memories about intelligent fingerprinting.so now not only are we looking at an identification of a person, we're looking at a method thatcan actually tell us what they've been in
contact with. have they been taking drugs?what drugs, are they a smoker? have they handled explosives recently? there is one particularresearch group out there that's really driving this particular field forward. looking at chemical imaging, so you'll noticethis picture here at the top of all of the slides. this is what's called a fourier transforminfrared chemical image. so what, a bit of a mouthful. basically what this image is composedof is it's a normal fingerprint. it's been stained, or it's been fumed with super glueand then they've taken the chemical spectrum, which is basically just measuring the differentvibrations of each of the atoms and each of the bonds between the atoms in that fingerprint.from that they can actually build and image.
now at the moment it's quite a cumbersomemethod to use. it takes quite a while to build up this image, several hours to several daysdepending on the type of equipment you're using. but in 10 years time, who knows. technologymay have caught up and we may be seeing a chemical imaging method that is actually notonly field portable but really rapid. that's a pretty exciting space to be in from botha technology perspective and a research perspective. we've also got what's noted as one of theholy grail's of fingerprinting, is being able to determine how old a fingerprint is. nowyou can imagine someone has been accused of a crime. the prosecution is questioning themand they say, oh no, i left that fingerprint there weeks ago. i wasn't there when she wasmurdered. i'd visited her about four weeks
beforehand and she was fine when i left. howdo you dispute that? at the moment there is no specific way of being able to determinethe age of a fingerprint left at a crime scene. researchers at the university of lausannein switzerland are now working on this to try and really build up a profile and a usablemethod to say, no you were actually there at the time. that particular chemical compositionof y our fingerprint indicates that you were there when she was murdered. that would beagain an absolute breakthrough in fingerprint detection. now i'll leave you on one last note, scientistsare essential for the advancement of society. now, and i'm not just saying that becausei'm a scientist. basically we get into science
because of the people around us. science isn'tseen as an exciting career path to a lot of kids because it's seen as dorky or seen asreally geeky. talk to your children about science. get them interested. get them involved,get them into things such as ultimo science festival, which is happening right now untilthe end of next week and the national science week which is wrapping up in a couple of day'stime. apart from that, thank you all for being avery attentive and enthusiastic audience. thank you to our hosts here at uts and tomy lovely sprouts and lisa for organising everything.