Researchers develop 'blood camera' to spot crime scene stains in a flash

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Could inspecting a crime scene for even the most minuscule blood
stains one day be as simple as taking a picture? It will if some
research now being conducted at the University of South Carolina in
Columbia pans out. A team there led by Stephen Morgan and Michael
Myrick have developed a so-called "blood camera" that uses a
combination of infrared light and a transparent layer of the protein
albumin -- the latter of which acts as a filter and is able to
highlight blood stains by filtering out wavelengths that aren't
characteristic of blood proteins (or so we're told). That's as opposed
to current methods for detecting blood at a crime scene, which rely on
the chemical luminol to make the stains appear in the dark. As New
Scientist notes, however, that method can also dilute blood samples
and make DNA difficult to recover, and create false positives. The
researchers don't seem to be stopping at blood, though -- they say the
camera could also be easily adapted to detect detect trace amounts of
other materials that aren't visible to the naked eye, like drugs or
explosives.