An nameless reader stocks a record: “Do you suppose that each and every fingerprint is in truth distinctive? “It is a query {that a} professor requested Gabe Guo all through an informal chat whilst he was once caught at house all through the Covid-19 lockdowns, ready to begin his freshman yr at Columbia College. “Little did I do know that dialog would set the degree for the point of interest of my lifestyles for the following 3 years,” Guo mentioned. Guo, now an undergraduate senior in Columbia’s division of pc science, led a workforce that did a learn about at the matter, with the professor, Wenyao Xu of the College of Buffalo, as one among his coauthors. Revealed this week within the magazine Science Advances, the paper apparently upends a long-accepted reality about fingerprints: They don’t seem to be, Guo and his colleagues argue, all distinctive.In truth, journals rejected the paintings a couple of instances ahead of the workforce appealed and sooner or later were given it permitted at Science Advances. “There was once numerous pushback from the forensics group to begin with,” recalled Guo, who had no background in forensics ahead of the learn about. “For the primary iteration or two of our paper, they mentioned it is a well known undeniable fact that no two fingerprints are alike. I assume that truly helped to strengthen our learn about, as a result of we simply stored striking extra information into it, (expanding accuracy) till sooner or later the proof was once incontrovertible,” he mentioned.
