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Thoughts for the pessimists
What makes your brain tick?
According to researchers, the parts of your body, if you don't use it you lose
it, particularly your brain. The more you use it, the more logic & brainier you
are, could that be true???
Will Cloning Make Fingerprinting Useless?
The answer to this myth is 'No'. Even cloned human beings would have different
fingerprints, because the characteristic patterns aren't totally dictated by
genetics - which explains why identical twins, who share the same DNA, don't
have identical fingerprints.
What makes fingerprints unique is still a mystery. The answer probably lies
in the way the so called friction ridges making up the prints are formed.
There are around 400 of these ridges for every square centimeter of friction skin
(which occurs on the palms of the hands and the undersides of thumbs and
fingers) and their shape is influenced by the shape of the surface they grow on.
Swellings called volar pads develop on the ridges. The size and shape of these
pads seems to be partly inherited: closely related people often have similar
patterns.
But the way the biochemical needed to form skin combine in different
concentrations at different points on the finer-tips.
Some people are born without real prints. Children with Down's Syndrome don't
have complete ridges as such because of a flaw in embryonic development.
There
is also a very rare skin disease which causes people to be born without ridges
on their friction skin.
The biggest threat to the use of prints to solve crimes was the discovery, in
1958 by a New Orleans dermatologist, that prints can be obliterated by the kind
of clinical abrasion used to remove severe facial blemishes.
Fingerprint first introduced in India in 1870 as a means of identification,
fingerprinting was put on a scientific basis in 1892 by the great English
anthropologist Sir Francis Galton, whose classification method is still used
today.
Galton was also the first person to attempt to calculate the likelihood
of two fingerprints matching by chance alone; his estimate of around one in 70
billion is still regarded as reliable today.
What's the moral in these stories?
Post your views in the Message Board today
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