Police

If you've watched even a single episode of CSI, you'll know how important it is to check suspects and crime scenes for gunshot residue (GSR). A new technique could make that task faster and easier than ever before, by causing GSR to glow green.

Although most of our clothes fold and crease with our bodies as we move, our shoes maintain the same shape and appearance pretty much all the time. With that fact in mind, scientists are now developing a method of catching criminals via shoe ID.

The City of London police force recently began equipping some of its frontline officers with Tasers. The move was the first of its kind in England and Wales, and criminologists used the shift to carry out a major experiment on how the public respond to visibly armed officers.

If you regularly watch any police forensics TV shows, then the word "Luminol" is probably already part of your vocabulary. Now, however, you might also want to add the word "Lumicyano." That's the name of a new product that is said to reveal latent fingerprints better than other methods.