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It’s possible to retrieve forensically relevant information from human DNA in household dust, a new study finds.
After sampling indoor dust from 13 households, researchers were able to detect DNA from household residents over 90% of the time, and DNA from non-occupants 50% of the time. The work could be a way to help investigators find leads in difficult cases.
Specifically, the researchers were able to obtain single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, from the dust samples. SNPs are sites within the genome that vary between individuals—corresponding to characteristics like eye color—that can give investigators a “snapshot” of the person.
“SNPs are just single sites in the genome that can provide forensically useful information on identity, ancestry, and physical characteristics—it’s the same information used by places like Ancestry.com—that can be done with tests that are widely available,” says Kelly Meiklejohn, assistant professor of forensic science and coordinator of the forensic sciences cluster at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
“Because they’re single sites, they’re easier to recover for highly degraded samples where we may only be able to amplify short regions of the DNA,” Meiklejohn says.
“Traditional DNA analysis in forensics amplifies regions ranging from 100 to 500 base pairs, so for a highly degraded sample the large regions often drop out. SNPs as a whole don’t provide the same level of discrimination as traditional forensic DNA testing, but they could be a starting place in cases without leads.”
Meiklejohn and her team recruited 13 diverse households and took cheek swabs from each occupant along with dust samples from five areas within each home: the top of the refrigerator, inside the bedroom closet, the top frame of the front door, a bookshelf or photo frame in the living room, and a windowsill in the living room.
Utilizing massively parallel sequencing, or MPS, the team was able to quickly sequence multiple samples and target the SNPs of interest. They found that 93% of known household occupants were detected in at least one dust sample from each household. They also saw DNA from non-occupants in over half of the samples collected from each site.
“This data wouldn’t be used like traditional forensic DNA evidence—to link a single individual to a crime—but it could be useful for establishing clues about the ancestry and physical characteristics of individuals at a scene and possibly give investigators leads in cases where there may not be much to go on,” Meiklejohn says.
“But while we know it is possible to detect occupants versus non-occupants, we don’t know how long an individual has to stay in a household before they leave DNA traces in household dust.”
The researchers plan to address the question of how much time it takes for non-occupants to be detected in dust in future studies. Meiklejohn sees the work as being useful in numerous potential investigative scenarios.
“When perpetrators clean crime scenes, dust isn’t something they usually think of,” Meiklejohn says. “This study is our first step into this realm. We could see this being applied to scenarios such as trying to confirm individuals who might have been in a space but left no trace blood, saliva, or hair. Also for cases with no leads, no hit on the national DNA database, could household dust provide leads?”
The NC State College of Veterinary Medicine funded the work. Additional coauthors are from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NC State.
Source: NC State
The post Household dust harbors forensic DNA info appeared first on Futurity.
Review yesterday, giveaway today! I enjoyed my time with the Pentel Orenz Nero, but I don’t think it will break into my writing rotation. It might fit for one of you, though, so let’s give it away. Read the rules below and get to entering!
Pentel Orenz Nero 0.3 mm Mechanical Pencil Giveaway
If you think mechanical pencils are boring, or the designs are static, then you have been missing out of great innovations over the past decade.
The Uni Kuru Toga gets all of the press, and rightfully so. Its lead-rotating mechanism works exceptionally well, and Uni continues to design around it. They even turned it up to eleven with a product like the Kuru Toga Dive.
While the Pentel Orenz doesn’t offer rotation, it does offer something else: breakage protection. That’s important for many graphite lead sizes, especially sub-0.5 mm sizes. That why you’ll see the Orenz lineup lean into those 0.2 mm and 0.3 mm sizes.
The Pentel Orenz works by using a sliding sleeve that protects the lead from breaking. Unlike traditional mechanical pencils, you don’t want to extend the lead past the end of the pipe. The lead should go right up to the end of the pipe, and from there, you are essentially writing with the lead pipe on the page.
This works for two reasons. One, the end of the pipe that touches the page is rounded on the edges, not cut straight across-and sharp-like a traditional mechanical pencil pipe. Two, the pipe retracts ever so slightly as you write, allowing the graphite to write, and continues to to extend the lead every time you lift the pencil from the page.
This is what the tip should look like when writing. The lead doesn’t need to extend more than this. As you write, the lead pipe manages the length consistently.
It may sound like a complex idea, but in practice, it just works. You just have to wrap your head around it a little bit.
The Orenz Nero is Pentel’s upgraded barrel over their standard. The barrel is a unique one-piece design, featuring a material that is a special resin-metal blend. It feels like a plastic composite, but is slightly heavier than a traditional plastic-only barrel, but much lighter than a metal one. It does feel rock solid, and looks amazing. I especially enjoy the grip ridges, which provide just the right amount of grip and comfort.
So, why would you use the Pentel Orenz over more traditional mechanical pencils? If you need, or enjoy, 0.2 mm or 0.3 mm graphite sizes, it is almost a must-have. If you have tried leads that fine in regular mechanical pencils, you have broken more than your share of graphite when writing, to the point where you toss the pencil down in frustration, and swear off those fine lines forever.
The Orenz solves that issue, and does it well. The pipe-on-the-page style doesn’t get in the way of your controlled lines or handwriting. It feels like a normal pencil when writing. For those micro sizes, it is an easy recommendation. For 0.5 mm leads and up, I do prefer more traditional mechanical pencils. It’s a visual thing, and I don’t break those 0.5 mm leads at a rate anywhere near I do the smaller sizes.
One issue I had when writing is that my vertical (downstrokes) didn’t always take. I think it is more of a pace thing than an angle thing. If I slowed down, it was fine.
The final consideration is the cost of the Nero. At $28.50, it is a pricey pencil. The Rotring 600, aka the best mechanical pencil ever made, is only $3 more. But, it primarily comes in 0.5 mm, and 0.7 mm sizes, with 0.35 mm tip options available, sometimes. If you don’t need protection for the finer sizes, I would choose the 600 every time.
It’s 0.3 mm, so the lines should be light. Also, you need to rotate the pencil in hand when writing, which I do naturally. This keeps a more rounded tip instead of an edge, or a flat spot. My biggest takeaway of the Orenz is to have a reason to own one. If I simply want to pick up and write, this isn’t the choice. If I need that fine line, then this is the best choice.
If you do need to use 0.2 mm and 0.3 mm sizes, then the Orenz is the choice. The basic pencil starts at $7, with a mix of shapes, styles, and materials on up the bracket until the top-end Nero. The Metal Grip is an excellent sweet spot at at $15.
The Pentel Orenz is one of the more interesting mechanical pencil lineups on the market. It hasn’t fully cracked my own writing rotation, but I do find myself reaching for it more frequently. If you are a fan and user of the Orenz I would love to hear your thoughts and how you use this pencil.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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A new forensic science study sheds light on how the bones of infants and children decay.
The findings will help forensic scientists determine how long a young person’s remains were at a particular location, as well as which bones are best suited for collecting DNA and other tissue samples that can help identify the deceased.
“Crimes against children are truly awful, and all too common,” says Ann Ross, a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University and coauthor of the study in the journal Biology.
“It is important to be able to identify their remains and, when possible, understand what happened to them. However, there is not much research on how the bones of infants and children break down over time. Our work here is a significant contribution that will help the medical legal community bring some closure to these young people and, hopefully, a measure of justice.”
For the study, the researchers used the remains of domestic pigs, which are widely used as an analogue for human remains in forensic research. Specifically, the researchers used the remains of 31 pigs, ranging in size from 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds) to 22.7 kilograms (50 pounds). The smaller remains served as surrogates for infant humans, up to one year old. The larger remains served as surrogates for children between the ages of one and nine.
The surrogate infants were left at an outdoor research site in one of three conditions: placed in a plastic bag, wrapped in a blanket, or fully exposed to the elements. Surrogate juveniles were either left exposed or buried in a shallow grave.
The researchers assessed the remains daily for two years to record decomposition rate and progression. The researchers also collected environmental data, such as temperature and soil moisture, daily.
Following the two years of exposure, the researchers brought the skeletal remains back to the lab. The researchers cut a cross section of bone from each set of remains and conducted a detailed inspection to determine how the structure of the bones had changed at the microscopic level.
The researchers found that all of the bones had degraded, but the degree of the degradation varied depending on the way that the remains were deposited. For example, surrogate infant remains wrapped in plastic degraded at a different rate from surrogate infant remains that were left exposed to the elements. The most significant degradation occurred in juvenile remains that had been buried.
“This is because the bulk of the degradation in the bones that were aboveground was caused by the tissue being broken down by microbes that were already in the body,” says corresponding author and PhD candidate Amanda Hale. “Buried remains were degraded by both internal microbes and by microbes in the soil.”
Hale is a research scientist at SNA International working for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
The researchers also used statistical tools that allowed them to better assess the degree of bone degradation that took place at various points in time.
“In practical terms, this is one more tool in our toolbox,” Ross says. “Given available data on temperature, weather, and other environmental factors where the remains were found, we can use the condition of the skeletal remains to develop a rough estimate of when the remains were deposited at the site. And all of this is informed by how the remains were found. For example, whether the remains were buried, wrapped in a plastic tarp, and so on.
“Any circumstance where forensic scientists are asked to work with unidentified juvenile remains is a tragic one. Our hope is that this work will help us better understand what happened to these young people.”
Source: NC State
The post Forensics study clarifies how bones of children decay appeared first on Futurity.
Looking deeper into the catalysts for violent crime. How an Iraqi U.S. Army interpreter became an underground drug kingpin. What plants have to teach us about life, both real and artificial. Aging, but with vitality and grace. How one Iceland town comes together to help baby puffins take their first flight, and our first-ever audience award. Here are five + one stories to kickstart your weekend reading.
Maurice Chammah | The Marshall Project | March 2, 2023 | 7,750 words
When we look at the face of a criminal in a mug shot or in a courtroom, what do we see? Many adults facing the death penalty have been shaped by childhood trauma or violence they experienced or witnessed in prison as juveniles. Mitigation specialists work to uncover traumas and dig into the personal and family histories of people on death row — not with the aim to excuse or justify their crimes, but to help paint more complete portraits of them as human beings. Maurice Chammah spends time with mitigation specialist Sara Baldwin as she works on the case of James Bernard Belcher, a man on death row for the 1996 murder of Jennifer Embry. It’s a complex story that Chammah reports and tells with great care and empathy, and highlights a little-known profession that helps to illuminate why people hurt one another and are led to violence. —CLR
Benoît Morenne | Wired | March 9, 2023 | 5,403 words
There’s an old episode of Portlandia in which the city’s mayor goes on the dark web to buy fireworks, and of course winds up buying rocket launchers instead. Buffoonery and prosthetic noses aside, that was the impression most people have always had of the dark web: a place where you could buy absolutely anything with total anonymity. Alaa Allawi was one of the people making the first part of that impression come true. After becoming a U.S. Army interpreter at age 18, Allawi developed an impressive proficiency for low-level cybershenanigans — and when he ultimately left his native Iraq for the U.S., those cybershenanigans became his way out of poverty, courtesy of selling counterfeit Xanax online. But it turned out that “total anonymity” wasn’t quite right, and after the real fentanyl in his fake pills led to overdoses and a campus cop took notice, there wasn’t a prosthetic nose big enough to save him. With precision and a relentless chronological tick-tock, Benoît Morenne details Allawi’s rise and fall, as well as the federal investigation that slowly tightened around him. Sure, you’ll find bitcoin and giant champagne bottles and Lil Wayne cameos, but the kingpin stereotypes are few and far between. This story has no heroes, anti- or otherwise. That’s the point. —PR
Amanda Gefter | Nautilus | March 7, 2023 | 4,890 words
Professor Paco Calvo used to study artificial intelligence to try and understand cognition. However, he concluded that artificial neural networks were far removed from living intelligence, stating “what we can model with artificial systems is not genuine cognition. Biological systems are doing something entirely different.” The abilities of AI have been dominating many a headline of late, making Amanda Gefter’s essay on Calvo’s theories a refreshing read. Calvo claims we have much more to learn from plants than AI. Plants sense and experience their environment, learn from it, and actively engage with the world, which he sees as the key to consciousness. His theories may be a little out there (I am not convinced neurons are not necessary for thought), but this essay did make me consider the significance of our interactions with our external environment in the thinking process. Rather than leave you with these Big Thoughts, I will end with Calco’s joyful description of plants: “Upside-down, with their ‘heads’ plunged into the soil and their limbs and sex organs sticking up and flailing around.” You will never look at your roses in the same way. —CW
Jane Miller | London Review of Books | March 16, 2023 | 1,999 words
What makes time meaningful? Is it time spent with a book? Learning something new? Maintaining your fitness routine? Doing things for others? What’s the relationship between meaningful time and being satisfied and happy? How does the definition of happiness and satisfaction change over your lifetime? If you’re anything like Jane Miller, age 90, you might ask yourself these and other questions, reflecting on the one resource we share on earth: time. At the London Review of Books, Miller ponders all this and more. “When I was 78, I wrote a book about being old. I don’t think I’d ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that I’ve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool,” she writes. While I can’t relate to her need to swim a kilometer a day, I can empathize with owning a body much closer to its “best before” date than its birth and the constant need to evaluate how I spend my time. In sharing her boredom and anxieties, Miller’s given me much to think about. —KS
Cheryl Katz | Smithsonian | February 14, 2023 | 3,125 words
Every year Bloomberg Businessweek publishes what it calls the Jealousy List, featuring articles that authors wish they’d written or that editors wish they’d assigned. If I were to have my own jealousy list for 2023, this piece by Cheryl Katz would be on it. I love it so much. Seriously, drop what you’re doing and read it. Katz’s story is about a village in Iceland where, every year, residents young and old work together to save baby puffins, also known as “pufflings.” The wee birds that look like they’re wearing tuxedos often get lost leaving their burrows and struggle to fly out to sea as they’re supposed to. Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carries them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate.” Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carry them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate. As climate change does its worst to the earth, ushering pufflings into the sky has never been more important. I’m jealous I didn’t get to write this story. Or maybe I’m just mad I’m not in the Puffling Patrol. They get to do good for the world by communing with adorable baby birds. How often is something so essential also so joyful? BRB, Googling flights to Iceland. —SD
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
Raquel Rutledge and Ken Armstrong | Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Pro Publica | November 16, 2022 | 13,808 words
This story starts with a house fire in 2013, then takes readers on a journey from the 1970s to the present, tracing the parallel yet wholly different existences of Todd Brunner, the landlord of the property, and Angelica Belen, the woman who lived there with her four young kids. Riveting and infuriating, Raquel Rutledge and Ken Armstrong’s work has been nominated for a 2023 National Magazine Award for feature writing. —SD
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Just your average boy-meets-girl story … if by “boy” you mean “young man with a penchant for computer hijinks who leaves Iraq for the U.S. and becomes a dark-web kingpin by putting real fentanyl in fake pills,” and by “girl” you mean “the DEA.” Maybe that Tor browser isn’t everything you thought it was.
Allawi wasn’t content dealing on the street anymore. He was chasing a broader market than San Antonio—hell, a broader market than Texas. He bought a manual pill press on eBay for $600, eventually upgrading to a $5,000, 507-pound electric machine capable of spitting out 21,600 pills an hour. He also used eBay to purchase the inactive ingredients found in most oral medications, such as dyes. On May 23, 2015, Allawi created an account on AlphaBay. He named it Dopeboy210, most likely after the San Antonio area code, according to investigators. That fall, Allawi dropped out of school for good.
Coil + Drift have recently relocated to Upstate New York, opening their doors to a new 3000-square-foot studio within the Catskill Mountains. Nestled two hours north of New York City, the space houses an office, showroom, and state-of-the-art production facility where all of Coil + Drift’s lighting fixtures are now produced by their in-house production team.
Founder and designer John Sorensen-Jolink established Coil + Drift in New York City back in 2016, but in 2021, moved the studio to the Catskill Mountains to immerse the team in the wild landscape that inspires much of his material-forward designs. A former dancer-turned-designer, Sorensen-Jolink designs objects that are grounded in human connection and spacial awareness, with a deep reverence for nature.
Visitors to their new studio showroom can view a series of new additions to Coil + Drift’s existing collection. The highly popular YAMA table lamp is now available as a floor lamp in a new tarnished nickel finish. The Atlas series has also been expanded to include a new mobile-like chandelier, and the June Floor Mirror has been introduced in a new ebonized maple finish.
Photos by Zach Hyman.
“The work of the family is real work,” said Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar who calls herself a pro-life feminist and has written influential essays and books.
Deprived of face-to-face contact with his parishioners during the height of the pandemic, Michael Coren, an Anglican priest, had to get creative to minister to the sick, the dying, the elderly, and the lonely.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the pandemic to shape the practice of my new ministry in profound ways. My daily tasks as a priest? Lead services at retirement and care homes; meet people who need housing, employment, money, and advice; visit the sick and housebound; help with feeding the hungry. I work as a priest independently (which also means that clergy anecdotes are, by their very nature, personal; there are no witnesses). A constant of all this activity is direct and personal contact. A constant of COVID-19, of course, was the absence of direct and personal contact. How do you counsel, listen to, pray with—and for—people if you can’t share the same space?
So I started two prayer groups and a bereavement group and chaired a meeting of parents of adult children with mental health issues. All on Zoom. I also started a telephone support group. Every week, volunteers called to check in with parishioners unable to leave their homes. Our job was to ask after people, be a friendly voice. Since there were certain things I couldn’t do, I had to compensate. You don’t need to embrace someone to show you care. Indeed, hugging is so common as to be drained of meaning. I tried to develop listening skills to reach further than where the usual words and actions could take me. One example remains: a young woman crying at the death of her mother. It was a phone call. I paused. A lot. When you can’t see the person, it’s hard to pace your moments. Instead, you give them plenty of time to complete their weeping, and you stay silent with them in their grief.
FreshRSS 