theweaselking | Getting away with murder just got harder.

Method developed to get fingerprints off damaged, degraded, and "wiped" metal surfaces, such as shell casings and bomb fragments.

Basically, skin oils corrode metals - brass especially. The corrosion isn't noticeable to human eyes, but we're not limited to human senses.

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From:

elffin.livejournal.com

And soaking the metal in sweat merely raises the noise floor for the method in question.

This can perhaps be foiled by coating the metal in gold foil before handling (doesn't corrode) - but that's kinda moot, and you'd be better off just wearing nitrile gloves.

This, if it becomes reliable in court as a method, is also a great argument against ever touching any metal surface ever again.

"We found your fingerprints on the doorknob." "I lived in that apartment seven years ago!"

I was hired to clean someone's broadsword where they'd wiped all the oil off it, let someone put a thumbprint on the blade, re-oiled it, and then sheathed it in a leather sheath and stored it for six months.

The answer was basically "It's no longer a stain; It's an authenticity feature. It's not coming out."

From:

opaqueplanet.livejournal.com

"great argument against ever touching any metal surface ever again."
ah, it's nice* to be allergic to metals that do this exact corroding thing...
I already avoid touching them. Muahahaha. Getting away with murder is no harder for me today than it was yesterday.

Hypothetically.
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*in this case. Most times it's an ungodly pain in the ass, of course, but for the sake of the argument we'll forget about that.