By IANS
Washington : Think twice if you are about to forge a signature. A newly developed technology will help forensic specialists find out when you signed a cheque, the pen you used, and the origin of the ink.
The technology that is used at present can only trace the ink if a piece of the document is soaked in certain solutions.
But the new method, aptly dubbed DART (Direct Analysis in Real Time), can read the ink chemistry from the paper in a few seconds without leaving any evidence that the paper was examined, reported the online edition of the Scientific American journal.
The DART technology, commercially marketed by the Japanese company JEOL Ltd., is a few years old and is currently used by agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to identify minute amounts of toxins.
Now, chemists at Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University in the US have adapted this technique to analyse ink samples.