forensics

People are dumping corpses in the high desert of western Colorado. But those unloading bodies aren't criminal masterminds. They're scientists. And out here, the usual rules of human decay don't apply.

International timber trafficking is an estimated $100 billion business. A lab that usually focuses on endangered animal cases is using a sophisticated machine to identify contraband wood shipments.

Dallas Mildenhall is one of the world's few forensic pollen experts. He recently identified a rare, mutated pollen grain that helped police crack a murder case in his native New Zealand.

Long after we die, many of the microscopic creatures living in and on us continue to thrive. In field experiments, forensic scientists are tracking changes in communities of microbes on human remains that could one day serve as clues.

For decades, DNA has been used to identify victims of crime, even victims of war crimes. But there's no international standard for using DNA analysis for identifying bodies after a disaster. So some scholars are calling for an international group with the same reach as weapons inspectors.