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drives located with nature documentaries, women's nylons, anything scarce. In the threadbare North, he lives in a rusting shipping container at the site. His South Korean wife and son deserted him for California, Desperate to connect with someone on the other side of the fortified border. He takes the risk of including his real name and phone number on his political leaflets. After years of balloon releases, he admitted wearily, nobody has called my entree to the ballooning world. The

younger Park still possesses a novice's enthusiasm. His balloons are constructed from tough but lightweight plastic normally used for agricultural purposes. An electronic ultimeter triggers clamps to release sacks of religious literature, kish and other cargo from about five thousand feet. The bags float down on tiny parachutes, which Park tracks via GPS devices. On the night that he allowed me to join him, his crew released all of their balloons at once.

Park arms stretched skyward, muttered a prayer. The team stood gazing up for long seconds as the twenty five balloons fluttered and climbed in the night breeze. Park said the balloons would be picked up by South Korean radar in twenty nine minutes, after which military police would come to investigate. The balloonists began loading up in haste to depart. I watched their handiwork ghost up into the darkness like a sad miracle next can Forensic science Stopped the illegal wildlife

trade by Joshua Hammer. Novel technologies and fresh crime fighting techniques are transforming the battle against trafficking, one gorilla handprint at a time, the sound of a gunshot altered the rangers that sometimes was a miss. Advancing through the forest in thung Yai Naraswan Wildlife Sanctuary in western Thailand, they arrived at a campsite littered with evidence of murder.

The rangers cordoned off the crime scene and seize the carcasses, along with three rifles, rounds of ammunition, the bush meat in the cattle, and later even a pile of human excrement.

The evidence was then transported in sealed bags to a crime lab in Bangkok, where technicians under the supervision of Kanita Utavan, director of the Parks Department's Wildlife Forensics Laboratory Center, sequenced the DNA of the bush meat and the feces, and the Police Forensic Science Office conducted ballistics tests on

the carcasses call it CSI in the Bush. To combat a surge and poaching and wildlife smuggling in Asia and Africa, conservationists and police are turning to method's long reserve for homicides, sexual assaults, and other crimes with human victims. DNA sequencing, fingerprint analysis, infrared imaging to detect blood, ballistics tests, and additional scientific techniques have been utilized with success against miscreants ranging from pangolin poachers in Zimbabwe to peregrin nest raiders

in Scotland. A dramatic change in wildlife statutes has led to the increasing reliance on forensics. In the past, poachers and traffickers caught in the act typically pleaded guilty and paid a token fine, But between twenty ten and twenty sixteen, as poaching numbers, sword countries began to drastically raise their penalties. They went from a fine of fifty dollars for possession of ivory two up to ten years in prison, says Rob Ogden, director of conservation science at the University of

Edinburgh and a specialist in DNA profiling. Criminals with resources began hiring skilled lawyers to fight it out in court. The defense started saying things like proved that its ivory. Ogden says, persecution collapsed. Prosecution collapsed because they lacked the scientific evidence. The scientific evidence analyzed in the Bangkok Lab

was critical in bringing Karnasuta to justice. The defense attempted to discredit the forensics and the evidentiary chain of custody, but Wetevan, the lab director, felt no doubt in left no doubt in the judges minds that Karnasuta's group had shot the animals. In twenty nineteen, a court sentenced the tycoon to three years in two months and a two million bought fifty nine thousand, seven hundred dollars fine, an outcome hailed by the WWF as a victory for wildlife

and a victory for the rule of law. Karnasuta's conviction comes at a time when wildlife and the rule of law are both under siege. High prices for ivory, rhinal horn, pangolin scales, and other wildlife products such as bush meat, the growing sophistication of insurgent groups and international crime organizations, and endemic corruption are all putting unprecedented pressure on endangered species.

In South Africa, poachers slaughtered ten thousand, three hundred thirty four rhinos, both black and white, between two thousand and six and twenty twenty four, the equivalent of two thirds of the country's entire population. The majority of horns end up in Vietnam and China, where they are carved into decorative objects or ground into powder for sale allegedly as medicine.

Africa's elephant population dropped from four hundred seventy two two hundred sixty nine to about four hundred fifteen thousand after the Convention on International trade in endangered species sites CITES in two thousand and eight permitted a one time sale of ivory to China, stimulating demand and opening the floodgates for laundered tusks. The numbers have stabilized, but the pacoderms remain in danger. Pangolins, tigers, snow leopards, and many other

species are also considered at grave risk. Nations estimates the global illegal wildlife trade to be worth as much as twenty three billion dollars a year. Wildlife experts have begun training law enforcement officers in Africa and Asia to back up their arrests with evidence that will stand up in court.

Tracy Alexander, director of forensic Services for the City of London Police, recalls that when she started working with police in Zimbabwe, they would stop a car based on a tip, find rhino horns in the back, four mobile phones and three guns. The driver would say, I know nothing about this.

crime scenes. Grant Miller, counter trafficking adviser at the Zoological Society of London who has trained ecological police in Mongolia and park rangers in Thailand, the Philippines, Benin, Cameroon, Nepal, Niger and Kenya, says that officers once passed around elephant tusks and rhino horns and posed with the contraband without using gloves, but they're coming to understand that effective crime fighting means avoiding contamination and finding evidence that will be

admissible in the court room. In India, the Forest Department and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau implemented a cutting edge intelligence gathering system that led to seventy three arrests and the dismantling of an elephant poaching network that ravaged the

population in twenty fifteen. In Mongolia, a haven for vulnerable and endangered species ranging from snow leopards to soccer falcons and wild camels, the Ecologic Police teemed with the Zoological Society of London and Mangolia's National Forensic Agency and the Zoological Society lou Ujin. Now they're well trained and they have a sophisticated forensic setup, says Alexander, including a DNA lab the whole nine yards. The wildlife cops are also

benefiting from new tools aimed at improving evidence gathering. At the London Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory in Lambeth, I met Mark Moseley, a silver haired police photographer fifty who spends his workdays snapping blood curdling images of homicide scenes.

more than seven days using traditional powders. Moseley wanted a material that would provide a record of the numerous hands that pass over Ivory during the weeks that often elapse between poaching in the bush and smuggling overseas. In twenty fifteen, after months of testing compounds, Moseley came across supr Nanomagnetic powder, a fingerprint enhancer made up of microscopic chemical particles that

can both absorb and repel sweat and oils. It proved capable of reaching reaving finger ridge details for up to twenty eight days after prints were deposited. The powder fit into those tiny pores which the others couldn't do, so we were bringing back much higher resolution, Moseley explained.

three countries in Africa and Asia. In twenty seventeen, IFAW announced that the Kenya Wildlife Service had arrested fifteen people, including five police officers, after using the kits to identify the suspects by their fingerprints on confiscated ivory. The kits have also been tested successfully on rhino horns, tiger claws, hippopotami teeth, sperm whale teeth and even eggshells.

Kits were distributed, says Alexander. I asked people there, how many fingerprint marks did you get a few?

has been attributed to the powder kits. Despite those disappointments, Tracy Alexander and her partners at King's College, London are working with a fingerprint gathering technology called vacuum metal deposition, which uses a sealed chamber and metal rods to bring out prints on canvas, bags and other non smooth surfaces, including elephant tusks that have been buried in the ground for long periods and have accumulated a coating of dirt

or mud. London police once used the technology to expose a victim's face on the pillow that was used.

The Trace Wildlife Forensics Network, in Edinburgh based nonprofit has provided funding and support for Kineta Wetavan's laboratory in Bangkok since twenty ten, and has since worked alongside governments to develop DNA testing facilities in Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa, Botswana, Zombia, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Gabon, Zimbabwe,

Namibia and Estwantini. Rob Ogden of the University of Edinburgh, who is a co founder of Trace, recalls a Zombian colleague mentioning a case in which it was argued that a zebra skin belonged to a striped cow. Now such blatant assertions are easily demolished in the lab, he demons. He estimates that prosecutors present DNA evidence in wildlife cases fifty times a year in Thailand and Malaysia. DNA sequency can also prove that purported wildlife contraband.

profiling system for the endangered big cats. Dozens of tiger farms in Thailand breed the animals bluffily and offer tourists the chance to feed adults and cuddle with cubs, but some farms illegally snatch cubs from the wild and pass them off as captive bread. A few also serve as tiger slaughterhouses, clandestinely chopping up the corpses and selling their parts, pelts, claws, fangs, even entire dead cubs and tiger bone wine in jars

on the black market in China and Vietnam. Tiger Base aims to establish a DNA registry of captive tigers throughout Southeast Asia to trace them to their points of origin, to support investigations into tiger kittens, killers, and tiger launderers. You get DNA profiles for all your captive tigers, and if there's a new cub on the scene, you can say,

where did this cub come from? The Australian scientists told me in the past they would say these two parents and you had no way to disprove that, but now we can. Forensic scientists are also using DNA to crack down on the illegal trade in paragrine falcons, listed by sites since the nineteen seventies as a protected species.

Lucy Webster of the Department of Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture updated the DNA methodology to help the police crack down. Recently, Webster's DNA lab outside Edinburgh played a key role in Operation Tantalon, a Scottish police investigation that snared a gamekeeper and his son in a plot to launder and sell twenty three wild peregrine chicks and two eggs to wealthy falcon racers in the Middle East. DNA sequencing is also being employed to pin down the geographical

origins of poached pangolins, elephants, and other endangered species. Investigators hope the information will help map illegal trading routes, point to specific organized crime groups, and single out vulnerable subspecies, but most forensics experts concede that the day when such data yield actionable intelligence is still far in the future. Mark Moseley is also looking far ahead. Moseley's latest forensics adventure is, like his Fingerprint project, a mix of the

visionary and the quixotic. Horrified by photos of several gorilla hands for sale in an African market, he devised a method of tracing the endangered apes in their body parts. By doing so, he hopes to pinpoint areas of intense poshing activity and gather intelligence on criminal gangs involved in the gorilla trade. I thought, how can we do something to identify the remains and create a deterrent, he told me.

Moseley's solution photograph and record the ridge details of the hands and feet of gorillas when their sedated or being released into the wild. A few years ago, he spent months at the National History Museum, preparing for field work photographing prints from taxa dermid apes or alcohol preserved extremities dating to the Victorian.

reflecting Moseley's efforts to bring a new generation into conservation. Now, the Zoological Society of London and the UN's Great Apes Survival Partnership are aiming to kickstart this in the wild, Moseley says, although he has accumulated just four sets of wild gorilla prints for his database, he insists he's optimistic. Once it's out there and everybody becomes aware of it, the data will drip feed in, he told me in Wildlife Crime Forensics, everyone seems to be playing the long game. Next,

the world's oldest color photos are still developing. More than a century after the invention of autochromes, the revolutionary pictures are now decaying and revealing a new kind of Beauty

by Katy Kelliher. In the ear late nineteen eighties, the late National Geographic Society photographer turned archidivist volkmar Venseil was delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking and heartbreaking, a box of delicate glass panels, most of them the sides of postcards displaying color images captured in

the early twentieth century. Many were deteriorating their once crisp scenes, speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal.

That powdery extract, then popular as thickener adhesive and fabric stiffener, was crucial to capturing the chroma of the area of the era, microscopic particles dyed green, orange, and violet were scattered across a plate and sealed.

image emerged. National Geographics magazines first full time editor, was an autochrome champion, commissioning and procuring glass plate works from photo photographers around the world. Because exposure times were long, much of early color photography consists of still lifes and landscapes, but National Geographic acquired dynamic images of life as it's lived, of crowded bazaars in Albania, of masked dancers in Tibet,

of riders atop brightly garbed elephants in India. Autochromes together with similar processes involving glass plates remained the primary means of making color photos until the nineteen thirty five debut of cootochrome film, with its layers of emulsion that were themselves photosensitive. In the film era, the Society's glass plates

were not carefully preserved. Wenzel, during more than forty years as a National geographic field photographer, saw value in the old photos, while many of his peers were focused on innovation. When the Society thinned its collection in the nineteen sixties, he rescued plates from the trash, taking them home for safe keeping an eventual return to the archive. Others simply moldered forgotten until Wenzel rediscovered.

and improper handling plates have cracked and fissured. Oxidizing silver particles have created radiant amoeba shaped orange blotches on the autochrome descendants, known as dou Fet colors. Violet bruises are evidence of vinegar syndrome, a chemical decay affecting layers of film between glass named for its telltale scent and contagious from plate to plate. Vinegar syndrome is a plague amongst photographic archives, says Sarah manco director of the National Geographic

Society's Photo and Illustration Archives. It all sounds rather tragic, but the blemishes also have given many of the plates a strange new beauty. No longer pristine documents of history, they become testaments to the ravage of time, abstracted, fragmented, and obscured, like so many ancient and admired artifacts. What's morris As image archivist Rebecca DuPont, witnessing the deterioration, a process that will only ever play out once, offers lessons

about the science behind these objects. If you think about it, photography is still a relatively new medium, only one hundred fifty years old, DuPont says, and the objects in the collection haven't yet reached the end of their lives. They're in a special stage right now where we get to see what happens to them. Even as the plates continue

to deteriorate. Some measure of permanence has been achieved. With a twenty twenty grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, MACO and a team of archivists spent three years digitizing the entire collection. These days, the originals are carefully organized in temperature controlled storage. Those afflicted with vinegar syndrome are sequestered,

and many broken ones have been painstakingly pieced together. Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing from documentary objects into a weird science history project.