Eric Cantona’s ‘science will make us eternal’ speech was funny – but he has a point

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DNA evidence often isn’t as watertight as many people think. Sensitive techniques developed over the past 20 years mean that police can now detect minute traces of DNA at a crime scene or on a piece of evidence. But traces from a perpetrator are often mixed with those from many other people that have been transferred to the sample site, for example via a handshake. And this problem has led to people being wrongly convicted . Scientists have developed algorithms to separate this DNA soup and to measure the relative amounts of each person’s DNA in a sample. These “ probabilsitic genotyping ” methods have enabled forensic investigators to indicate how likely it is that an individual’s DNA was included in a mixed sample found at the crime scene. And now, more sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are being developed in an attempt to extract DNA profiles and try to work out whether a DNA sample came directly from someone who was at the crime scene, or whether it had just ...
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