Jun Sunseri remembers his grandfather sharing stories about his service in World War II. A mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Forces, Sunseri’s grandfather was deployed to North Africa and Italy, where he repaired bombers and fighter planes that flew across Europe. Sunseri also recalls his grandfather’s sadness about the friends who never made it home. Now an associate professor of anthropology and archaeology at UC Berkeley, Sunseri is working to build a system that can expedite their recovery and finally deliver closure to their families. More than 80,000 American service personnel are missing from previous conflicts. Some 38,000 of their remains are estimated to be recoverable. The wreckage sites are vast and often in hard-to-reach forests, mountains or bodies of water. Scraps of metal can look the same. Highly trained and experienced aircraft experts who could tell the difference between an aluminum shard from a wing and a steel shard from a cockpit are thousands of miles away. ...