🔎 Cracking Cold Cases with AI  To investigate a crime like murder, forensic specialists can use clues from fly larvae feasting on a decomposing corpse. Specific larvae species can provide clues about the places the body maybe have been moved. Larval development can reveal when the victim died. But such determinations can require genetic sequencing of the larvae, which isn’t a viable option if living larvae are not present on a body. And even if they are, sequencing them often means destroying the larvae. Now, a few labs are using machine learning to find alternatives.  How it works: One lab at Louisiana State University used mass spectrometry to measure the chemicals that insect eggs, larvae and pupae leave behind. The team then turned that into a database of the chemical profiles, or metabolomes, of insects that colonize decomposing remains. Next, they trained a machine-learning algorithm to use that database to identify which insects might have been on a body, based just on the me...