Category Archives: Forensic

Phylloxera – a pest’s genome reveals its past

A CENTURY and a half ago an alien insect alighted in Europe. It displaced millions, ruined local economies and forced scientists, politicians and ordinary folk into a frenzy of defensive activity. Phylloxera, a member of the group known to entomologists as Hemiptera, or “true” bugs (as opposed to all the other critters known colloquially as bugs), appeared in France in the 1860s and proceeded to eat its way through many of the Old World’s vines…

This article first appeared in The Economist online on 4 July 2020, and in the print edition of 11 July 2020. To continue reading, click here (paywall).

 

 

 

Europe’s first farmers

EIGHT thousand years ago small bands of seminomadic hunter-gatherers were the only human beings roaming Europe’s lush, green forests. Archaeological digs in caves and elsewhere have turned up evidence of their Mesolithic technology: flint-tipped tools with which they fished, hunted deer and aurochs (a now extinct species of ox), and gathered wild plants. Many had dark hair and blue eyes, recent genetic studies suggest, and the few skeletons unearthed so far indicate that they were quite tall and muscular. Their languages remain mysterious to this day…

This article first appeared in the July 2020 issue of Scientific American. To continue reading, click here.

Fit to stand trial?

LLOYD Barrus stands accused in Montana of five federal crimes, including accountability to deliberate homicide relating to the death of a police officer. The charges have to do with an incident in 2017 that appears to have started in a dispute about a traffic violation. By the end of it, both Barrus’s son and Broadwater County sheriff’s deputy Mason Moore were dead…

This article first appeared in New Scientist on 25 September 2019. To continue reading, click here (paywall).

Inside the minds of torturers

WHEN Françoise Sironi was 6, her grandfathers met for the first time. One was Italian, the other from the French frontier region of Alsace. She remembers the conversation turning serious, then being mystified when the men fell weeping into each other’s arms. They had discovered they fought in the same first-world-war battle – but on opposite sides. The incident sparked a lifelong interest in what drives ordinary people to extraordinary acts. She became a clinical psychologist and, in 1993, helped found the Primo Levi Centre in Paris to treat the victims of torture. She is now an expert witness for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, specialising in assessing those accused of crimes against humanity or genocide…

This article first appeared in New Scientist on 12 July 2017. To continue reading, click here (paywall).

Identity crisis

 

WHAT is the essence of you? What is it about you that makes you, well, you? These are no mere academic questions for armchair philosophers, but practical ones with real consequences.

Take a police artist sketching a suspect from an eyewitness description, or a profiler writing up the behavioural idiosyncrasies of a particular “perp”. These representations become tools in criminal investigations that often lead to arrests. If they fail to capture the essence of the person being sought, the wrong person may be arrested…

This article first appeared in New Scientist on 8 April 2017. To continue reading, click here (paywall).