FINDING a clandestine grave quickly can be crucial to garnering the forensic evidence that nails a killer – but the sniffer dogs and soil tests used to find them can be unreliable or slow. The good news for detectives is that a simple hand-held gadget could now let them swiftly scan large areas of ground for signs of a grave.
Debate is raging over “whether sniffer dogs are smelling what we think they are smelling”, says Thomas Bruno, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. In some cases, dogs thought to have…
