David Handschuh/Pool via REUTERSAfter over two decades, the remains of a new father who was killed in the Sept. 11 terror attacks at the World Trade Center have been identified, with the help of state-of-the-art DNA technology. John Ballantine Niven was working on the 105th floor as a senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions at Aon Risk Services when he was killed. The 44-year-old resident of Oyster Bay left behind his wife and 18-month old son. Using a series of procedures that have be
if you re looking at murders in the past? well, if you re looking at old specimens, it may not be. as it turns out, the example of a hair. a hair has a root and a shaft. the root has good cellular material, and you can do the normal dna analysis and get a lot of data, very identifying data. on the other hand, the shaft of the hair doesn t have that same situation. it s got mitochondrial dna, which is present thousands of times in greater amounts than nuclear dna. so, when biological specimens decompose, the only thing you ve got left is mitochondrial dna. you find it in hair, you find it in bone, you find it in teeth. and, so, if it s old evidence, you can do mitochondrial dna analysis. thank you. and, next, the violent protests rocking israel after a new law targets the supreme court of one of america s closest allies.
May 24—After nearly 80 years, U.S. Navy Radioman 3rd Class Thomas E. Griffith has been laid to rest. Griffith, 20, is a Daytonian who was killed during World War II. No longer unknown, he was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery Friday, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) said. On Dec. 7, 1941 — the day of the surprise attack against American naval forces at Pearl Harbor, .
hair examiners testified. they testified through microscopic analysis that matches where more certain, you know when they made these matches. starting in 2000 they had mitochondrial dna to do the examination to supplement microscopics so they no longer had to rely on it. this was a problem from 1999 and earlier and shortly after it was discovered the fbi teamed up with the innocence project to correct this to notify every prosecutor in every case that this had come up that some cases that were reported as matches were exaggerated basically. it was determined that no examiner deliberately gave false testimony or deliberately lied on their examination. that s what was believed at that time until later mitochondrial dna analysis showed that the microscopic analysis was insufficient and in some case in error. so they ve been correcting this probable for a long time.