Scientists know if you are male or female using your fingerprint

As efficient as fingerprints may be when it comes to identifying the suspect of a crime, they have a huge limitation: you can only find out who they belong to when investigators have a previous record of the person's fingerprints. New research, however, may have found a way to narrow down the list of suspects by identifying whether the fingerprint owner was male or female.

Before you think about whether it is any specific curvature or other aspect of the "waves" of our fingerprints, we have warned you that the case here is quite different. Instead of using some visual comparison, researchers at the University of Albany developed a technique that analyzes the chemical composition of digitalis, comparing the most subtle differences in sweat left in print.

In theory, the idea is quite simple. All they need to do is analyze the concentration of amino acids present in sweat, as women tend to release twice as much (and in a different distribution) than men.

In practice, however, it takes a lot of work to accomplish all this. According to data published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, the researchers had to extract the amino acids from digital by transferring them to a piece of plastic film. Then they applied hydrochloric acid on the material and warmed it up, so they could then encourage digitalis to release its amino acids for analysis.

All of this work fortunately paid off. After a series of tests based on fingerprints left on various surfaces, they were able to identify the sex of the fingerprint owner with an accuracy of 99% of the time.

Of course, this is not enough to arrest someone alone, as with the fingerprint comparison method. Still, as stated earlier, this system can at least help filter out suspects, leading to a faster response than is currently occurring - or even as evidence when a fingerprint fails to identify a full ID because it is blurred, for example.

Technologies that will be part of the future in forensic research Comment on the TecMundo Forum

Via TecMundo.