People tend to rely too much on technology to produce perfect answers. Anybody who designs and engineers technology is aware of the opposite: only with a lot of work and sweat and inspiration we succeed in coercing nature to do as we please, more or less.
DNA traces of an unknown eastern-European woman had been found at almost17 crime scenes, including two murders (including a 22 year old police officer) but also car jackings, unprofessional break-ins and on a bullet fired in a marital dispute. The crimes where spread around a large area including south-west Germany, France and Switzerland.
It now turns out that the several-hundred-men task force might have really been chasing a phantom. (source BoingBoing)
The cotton swabs probably have been contaminated with DNA during their production. The sensitivity of DNA-analyzers has increased to a point where it is really hard to produce cotton swabs that are DNA free.
The Irish police suddenly saw in their statistics a certain Polish driver who was apparently breaking the traffic code all the time. When they saw multiple infringements at the same time at different places somebody started to dig.
Oops. Apparently many policemen could not decipher the structure of the polish driver licenses. Instead of the name of the person they had entered the polish word for “driver” in the field for name.
