Forensic Use of Color

Color enhances forensic work, a new breakthrough in catching criminals. The longevity of the perspiration marks amazed me. BBL

Color-changing polymer maps fingerprints

Detecting perspiration pinpoints people’s pores

BY MEGHAN ROSEN

SWEAT PRINT  Tiny pores on people’s fingertips ooze sweat droplets (shown red in fluorescence image) that can be detected with a new color-changing polymer. The technique could supplement traditional fingerprinting methods, which rely on impressions left by finger ridges.

COURTESY OF KIM ET AL

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Sweaty fingers make tidy prints. Beads of perspiration seeping from a person’s pores can leave detailed maps of the fingertips, and a new technique can detect the sweat.
Human finger pores ooze salty drops of water about the size of pinpricks, says materials scientist Jong-Man Kim of Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea.
He and colleagues created color-changing polymers that snap from blue to red when they touch the tiny droplets. Individual polymer units look like teeny tadpoles, with bulbous heads and skinny tails. When packed tightly together, they form stacked sheets that appear blue. But when water swells the polymers’ heads, the crowded sheets twist apart and absorb shorter wavelengths of light, making the sheets look red.
Pressing a finger to a polymer-coated film instantly colored it with red dots, Kim’s team reports April 29 in Nature Communications. Kim thinks the polymers could improve existing fingerprinting technologies, which analyze impressions left by finger ridges’ loops, arches and whorls. Pores speckle these ridges, creating unique dot patterns that match up with traditional fingerprints.
Forensics teams can pick up 10-year-old dots of sweat left on a piece of paper even in the absence of fingerprints, Kim says, but the dot data are often tossed because no one had a simple way to map people’s pores.

IT’S A MATCH Fluorescence image of sweat pores (red) overlaid on a scanned image of a fingerprint reveal similar patterns in pores and finger ridges.

J. LEE ET AL/NATURE COMMUNICATIONS 2014

Citations

J. Lee et al. Hydrochromic conjugated polymers for human sweat pore mapping. Nature Communications. Published online April 29, 2014. doi:10.1038/ncomms4726. 

Further Reading

E. Englehaupt. Stone throwers might toss fingerprints into police hands.Science News Online, March 18, 2014.
L. Sanders. Fingerprints filter the vibrations fingers feel. Science News. Vol. 175, February 28, 2009, p. 10.

Understanding Proportions

Not only do we have body shapes (which can also be called our Horizontal Body Shape) we also have to take into consideration our Body Proportions (or Vertical Body Shape).

Proportions are important as they tell us where to end our clothes, such as hems on skirts, hems on tops and jackets.

They help to create a balanced and harmonious appearance and can help us look taller and slimmer, or shorter and curvier. (After studying Greek statues' proportions copied by the Romans-BBL), Leonardo Da Vinci developed a theory that the balanced human is 8 head lengths tall (though most women aren’t, but clothing ranges are developed upon this assumption) and that the body is broken down into the following equal measurements.

1. Head length (top of head to chin)

2. bottom of chin to nipple (mid bust)

3. mid bust to navel (narrowest part of the waist)

4. navel to leg break (this is where the leg bends up at the hip, where you will see majority of trouser creasing, and is just above the crotch).

5. leg break to mid thigh

6. mid thigh to mid knee

7. mid knee to mid calf

8. mid calf to foot

Very few people  have these exact proportions (because they are based on the Greek "ideal"-BBL.)  Most of us are longer in certain proportions and shorter in others.  

What is most important if you measure your proportions is to find out if you have a longer or shorter body as compared to your legs (so top of head to leg break compared to leg break to foot).

If one proportion is longer than the other, you will need to visually balance this proportion to change the apparent length (more on that in the next post).

What I have noticed from looking at many people, is that we are proportionally SHORT where we tend to PUT ON WEIGHT first.

So, for all those A/pear shaped women, if you measured your proportions, you’d find that you are short in your thigh proportion, thus appear to have hips/bigger thighs, and it’s much harder to lose weight from this area, as you are more compacted in this area, yet you may have a long waist and flat stomach as this is where you are proportionally longer.

And for H shapes/rectangles (like me) and O (Apple) shapes, we are proportionally short through the torso, and thus put on our weight on our mid-section first, yet our legs, which may be proportionally longer (though not always) are slimmer. 

Vitruvian Man

Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1487

Pen and ink with wash over metalpoint on paper, 34.4 × 25.5 cm

Red, Black and White and First Color Words

 by tiffany in Dutch Language

A fat and happy Tabby cat

It raises the question of why we call those with Ron Weasley-hued tresses redheads (roodharingen) and not orangeheads.

Well, wonder no more, because Gretchen McCulloch of All Things Linguistic has dug down into the annals of etymology to come up with an answer. It’s a rather detailed one that you can read here, but basically…

As with many languages, the first color terms to originate in the English language were black and white, with red not far behind. The word orange didn’t come into play until the fruit of the same name arrived in England somewhere around 1300. Oranje(orange) began to be used as a color name in Dutch around the same time (1282).

Of course, there are more orange foods than just the orange. Why don’t we describe hair color as being “pumpkin” or “carrot” ?

For starters, pumpkins were a North American thing. Europeans didn’t know what they were until sometime after Columbus’s famous sailing jaunt in 1492. Etymonline has the word pumpkin cropping up in the English language in the 1640s and the Etymologie has the word pompoen appearing in the Dutch language in the late 1500s. Besides, pumpkins – much like melons – come in more than one color, so naming a color after either fruit just didn’t seem practical.

As for carrots, they got there too late. About 200 years after the orange. That and the fact that carrots weren’t orange. Not at first, anyway. Purple carrots were the norm, but you could also get them in red and yellow.

We didn’t get orange carrots until the 1600s. And, what do you know, it was the Dutch who began cultivating them!

Orange it is, then.

In short, the reason we call them redheads is because, at the time the terms were coined, there was no other color option.

Perhaps it has to do with the advent of the word tabby to describe striped felines. According to Etymonline, the use of the phrase tabby cat was first recorded in the 1690s, which would have given the English plenty of time to adopt orange as a color.

So what do you think? What color does your native language use to describe our pretty friend above?

Make Toilet Paper Owls

Make Toilet Paper Owls



A cute way to reuse something. Cute for Halloween decorations, perhaps you might want to hang these in the bare branches of trees Trick-or-Treaters pass en route to your front door.

Shades Reveal Emotion-What to Wear on a First Date

 “Colors and color combinations create moods and feelings, consciously and unconsciously,” Kate Smith, president and chief color expert at color consulting firm Sensational Color, recently told event planning site BizBash. “Whether we realize it or not, color affects us and our decision-making.” If you want to rev up people attending your event, use red as your color palette; if you want to calm them down, use blue. Even the color of your logo comes into play here; Fast Company created a whole bunch of infographics last month detailing how logo color affects the perception of a brand, and it’s a fascinating read. It makes sense that Nintendo’s logo would be red — exciting! Playtime! Video games! — while IKEA’s would be yellow and blue — mellow, cheerful, homey — doesn’t it?

Or consider home décor: According to Billings Gazette, there’s a reason shades of green, blue, and yellow often show up in spaces like kitchens and dining areas. They’re friendly, happy colors that encourage communication — just want you want in rooms where people tend to gather together to chat and share a meal.

I’d even go so far as to say that what color you wear on a first date might affect how your guy or gal perceives you. According to the swatches included with the Telegraph’s article, a pale pink or peach might be seen as feminine or soft, a bright, orange-based red as perky, and a blue-based red as sexy. If the clothes make the (wo)man, I’m sure color has a good deal to do with the resulting image; if I were playing the dating field right now, I might be tempted to test out the theory myself.

PIN IT

For more about this wacky and fascinating science, check out the Telegraph’s article,“Seeing Red”; it gives a far more comprehensive rundown of the history of color science than I ever could, along with a whole lot of other fascinating info about the field. 

Don't Underestimate the Power of Color

 (Photo : BethLo/Flickr)

Caucasian boys are most likely to suffer colorblindness among preschoolers, according to researchers.

A new study of 4,005 California preschool children age 3 to 6 in Los Angeles and Riverside counties revealed that Caucasian male children have the highest prevalence among four major ethnicities. In contrast, African-Americans have the lowest rate of colorblindness in preschool boys.

Researchers noted that the study confirmed previous findings that girls have a significantly lower occurrence of colorblindness than boys.

The findings confirmed previous studies and showed the rate of colorblindness in girls is somewhere between 0 percent and 0.5 percent for all ethnicities.Researchers said the findings suggest that 5.6 percent of Caucasian boys, 3.1 percent of Asian boys, 2.6 percent of Hispanic boys and 1.4 percent of African-American boys are colorblind.

Researchers said the latest findings highlight the importance of early diagnosis of color deficiency as the colorblindness can negatively affect academic grades.

"It's not that the child is not smart enough or bright enough, it's that they see the world a little differently," lead researcher Rohit Varma, M.D., chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine and director of the USC Eye Institute, said in a news release.

Researchers said that educators need to be aware of colorblindness and should provide adaptive learning tools and strategies for children with the condition. Varma said that teaching different lessons or assigning special homework could help children with colorblindness understand concepts for easily.

"That needs to start early on because labeling a child as not smart or bright enough is a huge stigma for the child and causes significant anxiety for the parents and family," he added.