A new technique created by Shin Muramoto and Edward Sisco at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland may provide information about when a person and their fingerprints were at a particular location. Their findings were released in July in the journal Analytical Chemistry.
The men used a chemical analysis technique known as mass spectrometry to investigate fingerprints of different ages, reports CNet. What they found was that as a fingerprint gets older, chemicals within it such as palmitic acid migrate away from the ridges of the print at a predictable rate.