New Orleans rape-kit backlog will be tested by start of 2012, police say

NOLA
New Orleans police officials said Wednesday more than 800 untested rape kits will be tested by the beginning of next year, clearing up a backlog that includes physical evidence from sexual assaults dating to the late 1980s.

Scientists Solve Puzzle of Black Death’s DNA

New York Times
After the Black Death reached London in 1348, about 2,400 people were buried in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, in a cemetery that had been prepared for the plague’s arrival. From the teeth of four of those victims, researchers have now reconstructed the full DNA of a microbe that within five years felled one-third to one-half of the population of Western Europe.