Ooooh come on, PLEEEASE let us know the sort of things going on, I would love to have tried this but didn't dare commit 3hrs? a week, too much going on with years' final accounts deadline, VAT deadline, house we are renovating being trashed and our house still like a building site.
I think China was ahead of the west in most things? they fell back for awhile but now things are turning again?
pores? I'm curious about that.
It started with a general overview of forensic science and where it fits in the judicial system. In the first week we were presented with a fictional crime scene, based on a real case. We see how the scene was dealt with by all the agencies involved such as police and forensics. Each week we then look at a particular aspect of the forensics armoury, then how it was applied in our particular crime and the results of each test. Last week we looked at fingerprinting and finger mark analysis, how the two are compared, databases, potential for errors, all that sort of stuff. We saw how finger mark retrieval would be carried out at our crime scene and had a go at taking our own prints.
If you want to have a go at this it's fun. You need some white paper, a soft pencil (I used 3B), some sellotape and a magnifying glass. Scribble the pencil on a sheet of paper then rub one finger end in it, then press/roll your finger onto the sticky side of the sellotape, making sure you capture the swirly pattern. Next stick the tape onto the white paper and you will see your print. With a normal household magnifier you can see the pattern of swirls and loops and some secondary features of detail. At a higher magnification you can see the pores (sweat pores) along each ridge. It's the sweat from these pores which leave the print.
We also learned about how and why the fingerprints are first grown in the foetus.
This week we will be doing DNA, and to start with we are considering some of the human rights issues with a DNA database, and the degree of accuracy possible - and what can lead to mistakes. There will be blood spatter and such wonders to see. You can go into as much or as little detail as is appropriate for you, with extra reading suggested for more detail. Throughout you can join a discussion about the week's topic - but with about 25,000 folk from all over the world doing this, it's hard to get a conversation going.
There are still things like tool marks, footprint analysis and so on to do, then in the last week we have an overall discussion and we see whodunit
