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Recently popularized by an onslaught of popular television programs highlighting the life of fictional forensic officers, forensic science is the use of scientific knowledge and evidence to solve problems related to the legal system or prove a theory about a past event as true or false. Forensics uses measurable evidence in the present to make conclusions about how the evidence came to be in the past.

The most well-known and largest field of forensic sciences is that of crime investigation. Forensic scientists examine clues given at scenes of crimes and on related evidence to create a solution to the unknown aspects of a crime. Because all types of evidence can be analyzed, experts from many different fields are needed and forensic sciences are broken down into many different subdivision fields based on what type of information is used to solve problems.

For example, entomology may be used by a forensic scientist. The behavioral patterns of insects may be used to give evidence to when an event may have occurred by studying how long an insect must have been at the scene, or by noting what types of insects are and are not present at the scene of a crime to determine if something caused them to change their normal behavior and movement patterns.

Forensics does not refer to only once science, but to a group of sciences that have the same purpose: to make a particular truth from past events to come to light. Talking about the history of the forensics science, although the people who lived around two thousand years ago had the notion of justice and truth (therefore, the one of forensics as well), they did not apply them accordingly and did not pay too much attention to these, reason for which crimes were often left unsolved and the criminals got away with it. Around the 13th century the first forensic related book was written, presenting cases of elucidated crimes.

As said before, there is a group of sciences that concentrate in the forensics, this group consists of psychological and social sciences, both of them having more branches related to a certain field involved in determining the truth: pathology, archaeology, psychiatry or identifying a person by using the dental records or fingerprints. The modern history of the forensics science began around four centuries ago when people became more and more interested in solving crimes and reducing the number of murders by paying more attention to the details and the evidence at the crime scene.

When talking about forensic experts, people usually think of something related to police and crimes, of people specialized in investigating a crime scene. The forensic experts are professionals who carefully analyze all the tracks that could lead to a possible suspect in a murder case and they focus on ballistics (gun shots mainly) or retrieving biological data in order to analyze it and determine the DNA of the possible killer.

Forensic specialists may work in a lab setting, examining data, videos, or evidence in a laboratory to determine how they came to obtain the properties they have. Specialists may also work in a field setting, examining on-location items and scenes of events to assist in determining what happened.

A web directory for forensics resources can provide access to information on the newest forensic science technology and methodologies, as well as provide information on the history of forensic sciences and their evolution to how we know them today.