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RE: Scientists have a new tool to identified species; by sequencing environmental DNA (eDNA) to find all the species that lives in the environment
This was easy to follow--it could have been loaded with jargon and obtuse sentence structure, but no, you made everything perfectly clear. eDNA, an interesting development, but I do have a question:
Could this not have application in law enforcement? Could it not be another tool to trace the activities of people? This might be useful for catching criminals but also (too bad) for increasing surveillance of civilians.
Now I'm going over to read one of your earlier blogs, one that describes insects committing suicide. That looks truly fascinating.
I'm glad you found it easy to follow, @agmoore! And that's an interesting question. I would say that it might not be very useful for criminal forensic right now, because the soil or water sample would probably include lots of people who are not involved, so it would probably give a lot of false-positives in its current state.
As for surveillance, I would guess that it could have some potential, but we're still a pretty long way from being able to use this tool for this purpose. It is probably also a lot less effective compared to using more commons means of surveillance.
Thanks for stopping by with some very interesting questions, @agmoore! I'm sorry I could not really give you a better answer though.