Scientists have found ways to tease even more clues out of fingerprints' telltale marks. It's one in a string of developments that gives modern forensics even better ways to solve mysteries like the anthrax attacks in the United States or the murder of a child beauty queen. For example, says chemist R. Graham Cooks of Purdue University, if a person handled cocaine, explosives or other materials, there could be enough left in a fingerprint to identify them.

Max M. Houck, director of West Virginia University's Forensic Science Initiative, says progress in forensics comes from a combination of new techniques, like those involved in the anthrax investigation, and existing techniques, like those used in the child murder case. Improvements in genetic research allowed police to trace the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a specific flask of spores, the FBI said this week. And while the killing of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey attracted national fascination in 1996, it was only this year that prosecutors announced that a new series of tests pointed to an unidentified attacker, clearing family members of suspicion.

The testing technique in Ramsey's case was not new, Houck said. But prosecutors learned it could be relevant to their case in a 2007 West Virginia University course.

In the new fingerprint analysis method, police technicians armed with miniaturized mass spectrometers can spray a solvent on a fingerprint and detect compounds at concentrations as fine as five parts per million in droplets that scatter off the print, Cooks explained in a telephone interview. Five parts per million is equivalent to 142 grams of chemical in 29 tonnes of material.

The testing method, discussed in Friday's edition of the journal Science, could be available in a year or two, Cooks said. He explained that materials such as cocaine and military explosives tend to be hard to get off the fingers. If someone who has handled them later handles something hard like a file or plastic binder, that will transfer the chemicals, he said. The chemicals are located at the points of the fingerprint's ridges, so what is then on the hard surface is the fingerprint in chemical. So police can not only identify the person from the print, but also connect the person and the drug or chemical, he said.


Based on the text above, judge the following item.

Either new techniques or the existing ones are supposed to be used to help progress in forensics.