The Forensic Science Education Blog

For aspiring criminal justice students, two of the greatest concerns are how much a program costs and whether or not the school provides adequate job placement services. The Federal Reserve (2017) revealed that student debt in the US reached $1.4 trillion and had overtaken credit cards as the leading source of US debt a few years ago.

The planet is changing due to human activity and not for the better. Nearly 100 percent of the increase in global temperatures is due to human activities. Consequences of this temperature rise include more severe storms, increased drought, rising sea levels, loss of species, and loss of food.

Overall, finding a bachelor’s, master’s degree or certificate in a forensics or criminal justice discipline may abet one’s professional goals, in addition to being an interesting path in a service-oriented career.

Modern hackers, in the purest sense, generally fall into two categories: the black hat hackers who use their skills for profit and malice, and the white hat hackers who work against them. What they have in common is a strong understanding of cybersecurity and a growing influence on modern society. President Biden has made cybersecurity a top priority, and both businesses and government organizations are scrambling to recruit whitehat hackers to bolster their cybersecurity assets.

Forensic nurses combine the nursing, forensic, and legal sciences to bring safety, medical treatment, and justice to their patients. Initially focused on victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, forensic nursing has grown to incorporate a wide variety of roles across the healthcare spectrum.

Fire safety experts confirm that while we live in uniquely challenging times, there are simple things people can do to protect their loved ones and property from home fires, wildfires, and the hazardous air quality that smoke creates.

Both science and justice are, in essence, the pursuit of truth. Perhaps nowhere do those two areas come together more directly than in forensic science. A critical element of the justice system, forensic scientists examine and analyze evidence in order to assist in investigations that ultimately may end up in court.

Forensics is the use of techniques or scientific tests in order to detect crime, and this broad field encompasses professionals from lab technicians to IT professionals to doctors and detectives. Work can be performed in a lab, out in the field, in an office, or one-on-one with clients or victims. Given the wide variety of jobs in forensics, salaries vary widely.

There are many different ways to measure the size of a cybersecurity hack, such as money, impact, or reach. Below you’ll find five cybersecurity hacks that are so big, in one way or another, that they changed the world.

While the US has only 5 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for nearly a quarter of its prisoners. There are nearly 2.3 million people in our nation’s prisons and jails. With 655 inmates for every 100,000 people, the U.S. is by far the leader in incarceration among Western countries.

“Defunding the police” means reallocating some portion of a police budget to community services such as housing, health, counseling, and education. These forms of community service have been proven to lower crime rates while also boosting public wellbeing. Unfortunately, the phrase “Defund the Police” has been subject to politicization and misinformation, and sometimes misconstrued with a call to abolish police departments.

Established by the United States Congress in 2009, March is National Criminal Justice Month, and its purpose is to promote societal awareness around the causes and consequences of crime, as well as strategies for preventing and responding to crime.

For well over a century, fingerprints have been at the cornerstone of forensic investigations in America. The resilience of this method of identification comes down to a powerful tenet that’s yet to be disproven: no two sets of fingerprints are the same.

As computers, smartphones, and networks have become more sophisticated, so have the various types of cyberattacks that they face. And an increasing reliance on connected systems means that a disruption in service can have an enormous real-world impact.

Cognitive science has already been integrated with several other high-risk fields such as medicine, air traffic control, and nuclear power. But a series of failures within the forensic community—many of which came into view with the advent of DNA profiling—have now demonstrated the need for cognitive research into forensic practices, too.