A new crime-fighting technique could make avoiding capture more difficult for even the most fiendish gunsels.

The technique, developed by British scientists, allows police to lift fingerprints from bullet casings, even if the casing has been wiped clean. The typical method for recovering fingerprints relies on the sweat from fingertips left on the casing by the criminal. If the casing is wiped clean, then recovering a fingerprint from sweat becomes next to impossible. However, the new technique relies on a substance in sweat that doesn't wipe away so easily: salt.

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For decades, people referred to the non-coding bits of DNA between genes as junk DNA. Then, in the eighties scientists discovered that some of that junk DNA served an important purpose. The DNA attracted or repelled transcription factors and RNA, greatly enhancing or inhibiting the potency of adjacent genes. Now scientists have just found that one of those gene enhancers may be what separates humans and chimps.

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A new study released by the University of Colorado at Boulder claims that a global sea rise of more than six feet by the year 2100 is nearly impossible.

The researchers used conservative, medium, and extreme scenarios for Greenland, Antarctica, and the world's smaller glaciers and ice caps. Each scenario produced a result from two feet of sea rise to no more than six feet of sea rise. When factoring in thermal expansion due to warming waters, the team concluded that the most plausible scenario would result in a total sea rise of roughly three feet to six feet by 2100.

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One of the first things Eric Mattessich discovered in engineering school was that the typical internal combustion engine blows about 70 percent of the energy it creates straight out of the tailpipe in the form of heat. So, he wondered, could he adapt the kind of heat-recapturing mechanisms used to make powerplants more efficient to work on hybrid cars? “The technology has been around since the 1900s,” he points out. “It’s just that no one has put it into such a small package before.”

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