![]() While pretty cool in their own right, black lights can also be an effective tool in detecting evidence of rodents. An easy to implement approach for laboratories to visualize particle spread during the handling and analysis of drug evidence. Tech Talk - Using Black Light to Detect Rodent Evidence - Copesan. “This is a great way for labs to see which of their practices contribute to the spread of drug residues, and to make sure that their cleanup routines are effective,” Sisco said. The researchers’ paper is written in such a way that any laboratory can reproduce the black-light experiment. Mice will deposit anywhere from hundreds to thousands of micro droplets of urine per day. This means rats and mice urinate and defecate frequently, whenever and wherever the urge hits them. These include changing gloves frequently, using vials and test tubes with large mouths to limit spillage when transferring material into them, and having two sets of wash bottles, one for casework and one for cleanup. Black light becomes a useful tool for rodent detection because rats and mice are incontinent. This visualization experiment led the authors to suggest several steps that might minimize spread. Highly sensitive instruments are more likely to detect small amounts of drug residue in the environment, so those labs have to be extra careful about limiting their spread. ![]() Drug dealers often mix small amounts of fentanyl into heroin and cocaine, and some labs are increasing the sensitivity of their instruments to detect those small amounts. ![]() But that has changed, and not only for reasons of workplace safety. Under everyday lights the brick looked like evidence from a drug seizure, but under ultraviolet light - also called UV or black light - it glowed a bright orange.īefore the emergence of fentanyl and other super-potent drugs, such small amounts of drug residue were not a major concern. To see how it happens, the two NIST research scientists, Edward Sisco and Matthew Staymates, fabricated a brick made of white flour mixed with a small amount of fluorescent powder. The spread of drug particles cannot be completely avoided - it is an inevitable result of the forensic analyses that crime labs must perform. Their study, recently published in Forensic Chemistry, addresses safety concerns in an age of super-potent synthetic drugs like fentanyl, which can potentially be hazardous to chemists who handle them frequently. Instead, their aim was to study the way drug particles get spread around crime labs when analysts test suspected drug evidence. When two scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) brought black lights and glow powder into the Maryland State Police crime lab, they weren’t setting up a laser tag studio or nightclub.
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