This student material on forensics covers the following:
- Blood
- Experiment Inventory
- Bloodstain Analysis

Forensic anthropology is the application of anthropology to criminal investigations. It incorporates concepts and methods from biological anthropology (the study of the physical aspects of humanity).
Identifying unknown individuals is a key part of forensic anthropology. Anthropologists assist in identifications primarily by constructing a biological profile. This includes estimating age, sex, stature, and ancestry, as well as identifying specific characteristics, like diseases or injuries. In addition to helping identify human remains, the anthropologist analyzes injuries that happened around the time of a person's death, which can help determine how a person died. To do these things, an anthropologist begins by asking a series of important questions.

Website includes more information on forensic anthropology, including photos and videos.

"BLOSSOMS video lessons are enriching students' learning experiences in high school classrooms...Our Video Library contains over 100 math and science lessons, all freely available to teachers as streaming video and Internet downloads and as DVDs and videotapes."

Learn about:
*biology
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Select Videos (then video library), Projects or Resources (then your subject) from the top menu and the subject you'd like resource for to get started.

The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law, exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The Innocence Project's mission is to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.

Science Online offers a comprehensive overview of a broad range of scientific disciplines. This resource includes eLearning modules, teacher support materials, diagrams, interactive science experiments and more.This resource is primarily designed for high school students but there is some content appropriate for Grade 6 - Grade 8 students.

A collection of resources for students. This website includes many free lessons, activities and resources for students.
Some things included:
- FBI History
- Forensics Blogs
- CSI Web Adventures
- Fingerprints
- Blood & DNA
- Many, many more!

We touch things every day: a coffee cup, a car door, a computer keyboard. Each time we do, it is likely that we leave behind our unique signature- in our fingerprints.

No two people have exactly the same fingerprints. Even identical twins, with identical DNA, have different fingerprints. This uniqueness allows fingerprints to be used in all sorts of ways, including for background checks, biometric security, mass disaster identification, and of course, in criminal situations.

Fingerprint analysis has been used to identify suspects and solve crimes for more than 100 years, and it remains an extremely valuable took for law enforcement. Once of the more important uses for fingerprints is to help investigators link one crime scene to another involving the same person. Fingerprint identification also helps investigators to track a criminal's record, their previous arrests and convictions, to aid in sentencing, probation, parole and pardoning decisions.

This website includes information on the following:
-Principles of Fingerprint Analysis
-When and How Fingerprint Analysis is Used
-How Fingerprints are Collected
-Fingerprint Analysis Process
-FAQs
-Common Terms
-Resources and References

This site covers information on the following:

Skeletal Morphology
Why do teeth come in different shapes and sizes?

Bone Biology
What types of cells form bone?
What materials make up bone?
What is the structure of bone?
What is the function of bone?
How do muscles attach to bones?
How do bones grow?
How do bones form?

The Human Skeleton
What is the smallest bone in the human body?
What is the longest bone in the human body?
How many bones are in the human body?

WARNING Graphic Content: The videos and images below contain graphic documentation of real life, rotting human and animal corpses that may be disturbing to a younger audience.

A forensic scientist enters a crime scene and sees some flies, maggots, and a few beetles on and around a dead body. She immediately begins collecting them. Why? Because these insects can help investigators solve crimes!
The type and ages of insects found at a crime scene can help investigators determine how long a body has been lying there, for instance, and if the victim had taken any drugs, medications, or poison before death.
Our understanding of the clues that insects can provide about a crime scene comes from research done at facilities called body farms. At these facilities, forensic scientists study how bodies decompose, and forensic entomologists study the insects that contribute to that decomposition.
In this activity, you will create your own mini-body farm to attract insects to a “corpse” (in this case, a piece of meat). Over the course of a week, you will observe the number and types of insects that arrive at your corpse. You’ll use that data to explore how crime scene conditions affect the decomposition of a corpse.

The key to any successful criminal investigation and prosecution is the quality of evidence obtained at the crime scene. The more evidence collected, the greater the likelihood of a conviction. Crime scene investigators are highly skilled in the investigation and collection of evidence, and they often have to be on the lookout for numerous types of evidence. Here are some of the basic evidence types found at a crime scene.

Most of us will have heard the term Ballistics at some time or other - more often than not when we have been watching fictionalised accounts of police work on television or in the cinema.

What is Ballistics?
Ballistics is the area of Forensic Science that deals with firearms; how they are used, why they are used and why they are used frequently in the practice of murder.

What many people do not realise is that when a person is shot the wound and the condition of the victim can tell a lot about the nature of the weapon that has been used. Indeed if the weapon has been left at the scene of the crime - which sometimes happens when the perpetrator panics - the weapon itself can go a long way to providing valuable information as to the kind of person who has committed the offence.

Identifying a Weapon
Most guns have their own unique identifying features and even if the gun has not been left at the crime scene many degrees of information can be determined from the bullet, the nature of the wound and any residue that is left around it.

Bullets contain a mixture of gunpowder and cordite and these leave burn marks on the skin of the individual either wounded or killed, they also leave a fine residue on the fingers and hands of the individual firing the gun. These burn marks can signify closeness of the victim to the perpetrator, kind of weapon and also if the weapon has had any modifications made to it. Some weapons have been disarmed by having the firing pins and mechanisms removed but there are individuals who can 'reactivate' these weapons for use again.
Also, each weapon's barrel contains small ligatures and grooves, which, when a bullet is fired from them, make marks on the shell casing, which can be used as a means of identifying the make and model of gun if these shell casings are found at the scene.
It is also worth noting that an automatic - or semi automatic weapon - will expel shell casings as the weapon fires a round whereas a revolver will fire the round but retain the shell casing within the barrel.

Investigating
The field of ballistics is able to identify rifling patterns, marks made by using suppressors (silencers), shell casings, powder burn and many other different areas relating to the use of firearms and the evidence they leave behind.

Indeed most ballistics experts will be able to tell you the particular weapon simply by the sound of it being fired. They will also be able to carry out distance and depth tests which include firing rounds of ammunition into water, sand and other substances to determine how close a person would have to be to receive a life threatening wound from a gun.
Ballistics is a very important part of the world of Forensic Science and much of its evidence is used in criminal proceedings. In some cases the use of ballistics research can prove a link between many different crimes carried out over a lengthy period of time. This is also an important function of the ballistics team as many weapons are passed and sold on between criminals during their life cycle.

For those of us who are familiar with the use of Police Service Dogs (PSDs) in evidence gathering, or “Article Search”, it is certainly not a big step to think of PSDs as a possible tool in the location of crime scenes. Although dogs have been used with a reasonable amount of success over the years, it is surprising the number of dog handlers who have not ever considered using their PSDs to assist in this manner.
Crimes against persons often occur in one area and the victim either escapes or is allowed to leave. The trauma, shock and general confusion related to the incident makes it difficult for the victim to located the scene. In cases such as a homicide, the body is often moved in an attempt to mislead police. More and more, especially in gang-related crimes, in some of these cases, investigators may be able to gather some intelligence in regard to where the crime could have possibly occurred, and this is where PSDs are able to help. in many cases, the PSDs are able to go into an area and pinpoint the scene for investigators. For those dog handlers and trainers who do not include “Article Search” in their programs, "Tracking can often be equally effective in locating a crime scene with a PSD.
Those canine teams that are capable of both behaviours (Tracking and Article Search) have two weapons at their disposal in their attempt to locate a crime scene. In those cases, the dog handler can decide which behaviour to use, depending on the intelligence he gathers as well as the environment and other related considerations such as time frame, weather and contamination. In some cases, the combination of the two behaviours will allow the canine team to be successful.

Included is case studies.

In the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) simulation you will be thrown right into a crime scene where a murder has taken place. To investigate the crime scene your first task is to collect blood samples in the hope that the murderer has left traces of their DNA.

Analyze DNA
After sampling you will go to the lab to isolate and analyze the sample of DNA you collected. By using a PCR kit, a thermocycler, and the purified DNA from the crime scene, it is up to you to mix the correct reagents and perform the PCR experiment.

See the structure of DNA and its replication up close
A 3D animation will show the PCR experiment at the molecular level, illustrating the structure of DNA and its replication. Quiz questions will be asked throughout the experimental process, as well as at specific steps of the PCR itself.

Identify the murderer
In the PCR simulation, you will your collected sample and other prepared samples from the suspects on a gel, and then compare the patterns that emerge.

Will you be able to identify the murderer?

Students use DNA profiling to determine who robbed a bank. After they learn how the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is used to match crime scene DNA with tissue sample DNA, students use CODIS principles and sample DNA fragments to determine which of three suspects matches evidence obtain at a crime location. They communicate their results as if they were biomedical engineers reporting to a police crime scene investigation.

Forensic scientists are recovering buried clues of the lives of early colonists and discovering the stories written in their bones. Using graphics, photos, and online activities, this Webcomic unravels a mystery of historical and scientific importance about the life of a recently discovered 17th century human body along the James River on the Chesapeake Bay. Students can analyze artifacts and examine the skeleton for the tell-tale forensic clues that bring the deceased to life and establish the cause of death. Teacher resources are included. Note: Turn off pop-up blocker to successfully experience all site features.