A new crime-fighting technique could make avoiding capture more difficult for even the most fiendish gunsels.

The technique, developed by British scientists, allows police to lift fingerprints from bullet casings, even if the casing has been wiped clean. The typical method for recovering fingerprints relies on the sweat from fingertips left on the casing by the criminal. If the casing is wiped clean, then recovering a fingerprint from sweat becomes next to impossible. However, the new technique relies on a substance in sweat that doesn't wipe away so easily: salt.

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For decades, people referred to the non-coding bits of DNA between genes as junk DNA. Then, in the eighties scientists discovered that some of that junk DNA served an important purpose. The DNA attracted or repelled transcription factors and RNA, greatly enhancing or inhibiting the potency of adjacent genes. Now scientists have just found that one of those gene enhancers may be what separates humans and chimps.

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What started as an academic problem in a robotics class—how to build a robot that can hop like a pogo stick, roll on wheels, and walk up stairs—has grown into a concept that could one day help with search-and-rescue missions.

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Though we may often think of cholera as a disease of the past, virtually eradicated when John Snow famously linked an 1854 outbreak of the epidemic in London to an infected water well on Broad Street, it still poses a threat in almost every single developing country in the world. Over 150 years after Snow essentially founded modern epidemiology, a team of American scientists are using remote satellite imaging to predict cholera outbreaks before they occur.

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There's some good news as hurricane season is getting under way: an MIT graduate student has developed a computer model that helps evacuation managers make better decisions, and possibly save lives in the process.

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Weeks before Hurricane Gustav slammed into the Caribbean and the Louisiana Gulf Coast, hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University continued to warn of the higher-than-average probability of at least one intense (or major) hurricane making landfall in the United States in the remaining months of this year's hurricane season.

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Another awesome set of entries to the PopSci photo contest. Thanks to everyone who entered and congrats to this week's winner for the theme "Science Up Close": Freshdopetea (via our Flickr pool).

For all of you photogs, another contest is in the works. After the jump, get the low down. And as always, happy shooting!

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Primate intelligence gives me cognitive dissonance. It’s fascinating that monkeys can recognize numbers, construct tools and even follow to-do lists. But it also bruises my ego, just slightly, knowing that monkeys aren’t that different from my parents, friends or heroes. (Michael Phelps excluded. He’s the übermensch.)

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The problem with cancer surgery, or so we hear, is that it's difficult for surgeons to know if they've removed all of a tumor, especially in late-stage cancers when the edges get indistinct. But a new imaging technology developed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's Center for Imaging Technology and Molecular Diagnostics in Boston is giving cutters visual cues on just where to aim their scalpels.

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In London, Ontario, a team from the University of Western Ontario is bringing a fairy tale to life at the Insurance Research Lab for Better Homes. They don't have a wolf, but in their "Three Little Pigs" project they are literally trying to blow the roof off, subjecting full-scale houses to pressures that simulate wind forces matching those of a Category 5 hurricane: 200 mph. Researchers are looking to find the sources of structural weakness in house construction in order to improve building design in the future.

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It’s not hard to notice when your co-worker is grouchy, your friend is exhausted, or your boss is overjoyed. Without recognizing it, we easily pick up on other people’s emotions by registering certain behavioral cues. In turn, we understand whether we need to back off, lend a helping hand, or, in the case of the boss, ask for a raise. Now comes the question: If we can do this, then why not computers? Why not robots? Indeed, by picking up on some of these same emotional traits, robots today are learning to act more naturally around their human counterparts.

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