FORENSICS experts will soon be able to identify drugs, gunshot residues or explosives at a crime scene in a matter of minutes, thanks to a new on-the-spot way to sample and analyse chemicals. By removing the need to take forensic samples back to the lab, it will allow detectives to understand what has happened all the quicker.
Forensic scientists currently have to take samples at a crime scene and take them back to the lab to have them analysed in a mass spectrometer. This fragments and ionises the constituent chemical components and then separates them by their mass-to-charge ratio to…
