Forensic science international
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The introduction of new psychoactive substances (NPS) on the illicit drug market has led to major challenges for the analytical laboratories. Keeping screening methods up to date with all relevant drugs is hard to achieve and the risk of missing important findings in biological samples is a matter of concern. Aiming for an extended retrospective data analysis, diagnostic fragment ions from synthetic cannabinoids (n=251), synthetic opioids (n=88) and designer benzodiazepines (n=26) not included in our original analytical method were obtained from the crowdsourced database HighResNPS.com and converted to a personalized library in a format compatible with the analytical instrumentation. ⋯ Of these, only one finding of phenibut was considered plausible after checking retention times and signal-to-noise ratios. This study shows that new compounds can be detected retrospectively in data files from QTOF-MS using an updated library containing diagnostic fragment ions. Automatic screening procedures can be useful, but a manual re-evaluation of positive findings will always be necessary.
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The influence of two different variables on deflection was studied with 9mm Luger calibre bullets, fired through ballistic gelatine. To test whether bullet type affects trajectory deflection, bullets of four different types were fired (20 shots per type) through 25cm of 10% gelatine at a 5m muzzle-to target-distance. ⋯ To test whether muzzle-to target-distance affects trajectory deflection, additional shots were fired with one of the four bullet types (7.5g FMJ-RN) at 1 and 15m muzzle-to target distances (20 shots per distance), again through 25 cm of 10% gelatine. A Kruskal-Wallis test showed that there was no significant difference (p=.72, significance level of 0.05) in deflection between the three muzzle-to target distances of 1, 5 and 15m.