Police finger printing
Ansel, Payton
Facts
Exemplar
Patent
Plastic
Dead mans' hands
Placing the hand of a dead or unconscious person on a scanner to gain unauthorized access has become a common plot device. However, a Mythbusters episode revealed that this doesn't work (at least with the scanners available to the program). But Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman found a way to convert fingerprints lifted from the hand to a photographic form that the sensor would accept. For obvious reasons, they refuse to reveal the technique.
Research
The International Fingerprint Research Group (IFRG) which meets biennially, consists of members of the leading fingerprint research groups from Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and Israel and leads the way in the development, assessment and implementation of new techniques for operational fingerprint detection.