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.

“Some of the residues left behind are from naturally occurring compounds in the skin and some are from other surfaces or materials a person has touched.”

Because of the non-intrusive nature of the technique, Cooks and others involved are looking to use the new method as an alternative to blood and urin tests in athletes. But something tells us this is going to be used to f**k over a hell of a lot more people than that.

(Image source: Telegraph.co.uk)