Forensic Death Investigations of Dog Bite Injuries in 31 Cats

Animal bite injuries are common in free-ranging cats in Taiwan, and most fatal animal bite events are presumed to be caused by dogs. However, speculation regarding animal abuse may occur when carcasses with prominent injuries are found by members of the general public. Local animal protection offices and veterinary clinicians sometimes face difficulties in convincing these individuals by identifying specific features of dog bite injuries in cat carcasses. Therefore, the present study analyzed injury patterns and distribution in 31 necropsied cats with animal bite injuries, and applied deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) analysis for canine DNA identification in 13 cats. The main necropsy findings included puncture wounds (26 (83.9%)), linear or small, round contusions/abrasions (20 (64.5%)), lacerations/avulsions (17 (54.8%)), abdominal wall rupture/laceration (19 (61.3%)), herniation (16 (51.6%)), fractures (21 (67.7%)), broken claws (16 (51.6%)), and hair tufts on the body surface (28 (90.3%)). The most-commonly injured regions were the ventral thorax and axilla (23 (74.2%)), hind limbs (22 (71.0%)), shoulder-to-dorsal thorax (21 (67.7%)), back and flank (20 (64.5%)), abdomen (19 (61.3%)), neck (19 (61.3%)), and hip/tail/perineum (17 (54.8%)). Canine mitochondrial DNA was identified in 3 out of 11 cases (27.3%) that were sampled using wound swabs and in 4 out of 5 cases that had hair entrapped in broken claws. In conclusion, this study determined the distribution and features of dog bite injuries in cats and developed an elemental method using trace evidence for DNA identification in animal bites

An Integrated Thermal Compensation System for MEMS Inertial Sensors

An active thermal compensation system for a low temperature-bias-drift (TBD) MEMS-based gyroscope is proposed in this study. First, a micro-gyroscope is fabricated by a high-aspect-ratio silicon-on-glass (SOG) process and vacuum packaged by glass frit bonding. Moreover, a drive/readout ASIC, implemented by the 0.25 µm 1P5M standard CMOS process, is designed and integrated with the gyroscope by directly wire bonding. Then, since the temperature effect is one of the critical issues in the high performance gyroscope applications, the temperature-dependent characteristics of the micro-gyroscope are discussed. Furthermore, to compensate the TBD of the micro-gyroscope, a thermal compensation system is proposed and integrated in the aforementioned ASIC to actively tune the parameters in the digital trimming mechanism, which is designed in the readout ASIC. Finally, some experimental results demonstrate that the TBD of the micro-gyroscope can be compensated effectively by the proposed compensation system