Are all fingerprints different? In movies, TV shows, plays, and books, there are often situations in which a person leaves a fingerprint on something-and is later caught as a result of it. A fingerprint is considered positive proof-a mistake is impossible if a person has left his fingerprint. Here is why this is so. If you look at the tips of your fingers, you'll see a network of ridges. These ridges contain the "touch" receptors of the skin. These ridges (their pattern makes a "fingerprint") are different for every person and cannot be changed. If the skin of the fingertips is burnt several times in succession, the same fingerprints appear each time after the bums heal! There are the same kind of characteristics in everyone's fingerprintsa certain kind of arrangement in the center, along the edges, at the tip, and so on: But for each person, there is a completely different arrangement of these characteristics! Now, it is easy for an expert to find a hundred different characteristics on a fingerprint. This means a fingerprint has a hundred different types of arrangements of the ridges. Now suppose we take the index finger. In order to find two people whose fingerprints of the index finger have just two characteristics that are alike, we'd have to examine 16 people. To find two people whose fingerprints are alike in three characteristics (out of a hundred), 64 persons must be examined. This goes on until we say: we want to find two people who have the same print on the index finger-the same for all 100 characteristics. We would have to examine all the people who would live in the world during a period of four billion years! And this is just for the print on one finger to be the same! And, of course, we have 10 fingers. It is really one of the miracles of nature that each one of us has his own individual pattern of fingerprints and that it remains ours alone, unchanged, as long as we live. For Details
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