Dan Jones

My ex-husband was the most romantic person I’ve ever met. He also hit me on the day we got married, while I was wearing my wedding dress.

That’s why when I saw the footage of ex-Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice punching his then-fiancée Janay Palmer, I wasn’t surprised that she was now his wife. It isn’t — as many of the commenters on the original TMZ video have said — “all about the money,” or “she doesn’t care about taking a punch,” and it’s especially not that “she is telling all women it’s okay for your man to beat you.”

Domestic violence is so much more complicated than a lack of money, or not having self-respect, or feeling like it’s OK for your man to beat up on you. I’m not an expert on what makes women stay in abusive relationships or even marry their abuser. But I did both of these things and I can speak to my particular story.

I’m from a very conservative Christian background, so when I met my husband (let’s call him Hank) he seemed like God’s gift to my life. I hadn’t dated much in high school and I had just dropped out of Bible college because I ran out of money. I was working and living in the small town where my school was located, and Hank showed up at my church looking extremely dapper in his neatly trimmed beard and dark blue suit.

He wasn’t rich but he had a good job and spent all that spring sweeping me off my feet. It was as if he had watched a million romantic movies to inform his game. He brought flowers and chocolates like a normal guy, but he worked extra hard to make sure it was clear he wanted me. Notes. Phone calls. Phone messages. He wrote “I love you” in the dirt on the back of my car, took a photo and then washed my car for me. He often mailed cards to my apartment even though we lived less than a mile apart. They came heavily scented with his cologne.

The cologne started the part of my story that is much harder to tell.

One Saturday afternoon a few months after our first date, I opened one of the cards and then smelled it as he beamed on proudly. I sniffed and joked “like a woman” because he was the first man I ever knew to send a scented envelope.

I know it’s a cliche, but if I close my eyes, I can still see that moment in slow motion. His face changed from beaming to furious. And suddenly, I was on the floor. It wasn’t until he extended his hand down to me saying, “Oh baby I am so sorry! Why did you have to say that? I’m so sorry!” that I realized I was on the floor because his fist had put me there. I actually thought for a second that a piece of the ceiling must have fallen down. Surely Hank couldn’t have hit me? That was something that happened to other people.

Hank dove into what I now know is the cycle of abuse, but what then just seemed like a cycle of passion. He ushered me to the couch and got an ice pack for my face. He kissed my forehead. He had this strange yet very convincing way of talking about how he had hit me: he spoke in passive voice, as if the violence just happened, as if he had nothing whatsoever to do with it. “Oh, so sorry you’re bruised up,” he said to me that night.

It was an absurd thing to say, but he said it while he curled his body against mine, smoothed my hair, kissed me gently. He would even kiss me on the bruises themselves, like an indulgent parent smooching away imaginary boo boos. It was overwhelming and intoxicating. In some ways, it made me fall for him more. Look at how much he cared for me!

That sounds completely bananas, right? But as our relationship and the abuse became more serious, Hank told me that he only hit me when he had to. “Sometimes, baby,” he’d say, holding me tight, “something you say makes me feel like our love is threatened. And I couldn’t live without you. I couldn’t.”

Why did I fall for that line? Had I watched too many romantic comedies where the man grabs the women, kisses her as she struggles and she therefore falls in love? Probably. Had I watched the women in my family act out similar scenarios? Yes, many of them. I felt passionately in love when I wasn’t scared for my life. But the longer the relationship continued, the harder it became to tease out the love from the fear.

Hank asked me to marry him under a full moon, down on one knee, with a ring in his hand. It doesn’t get more romantic than that. And I said yes, at least partly because I thought the marriage would solve things. Happily ever after, right?

I thought: He feels guilty because we’re having sex, so if we get married he will feel less guilty and stop hitting me.

I thought: He feels scared because he loves me so much, so if we get married he will feel less scared and stop hitting me.

And more than anything else I thought: This is what passion looks like.

But engagement didn’t stop the abuse. In fact, Hank became more controlling. I tried to enroll in community college; he said I didn’t need so much book learning, that I was smart enough as it was. I tried to spend time with friends; he said he wanted to spend more time with me so we could make our relationship rock solid. When I wanted to visit my family, he said said that I was depending too much on them when I should be depending on him.

It was this isolation from my loved ones,  rather than the physical abuse (which, by this time, had sent me to the emergency room twice) that motivated my request that the wedding plans be put on hold. “Let’s talk to our pastor and make sure we’re a good match for each other,” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t explode. Instead, Hank imploded, crying, “This is gonna kill my momma.” He became such a little boy in that moment, I reached out to comfort him and my request was forgotten.

We arranged a small wedding at a chapel, but I still wanted a white dress. He insisted on helping me prepare for the ceremony. Superstition was nothing, he said, stacked up against our love. As he smoothed my gown over my shoulders he said, “I don’t know that white is the right color for you.”

I joked back, “You aren’t exactly Mr. Purity yourself.”

And he hit me so hard in the chest that I bent over, gasping.

“Don’t cry baby,” he said, “you’ll smear your makeup.”

I know. I know. I know.

I should have ripped off that dress and ran away screaming. But the truth is, by the time that moment came, I felt so lucky to be with him, this man who claimed to love me so much he had to hit me, and so confused and so frozen that running away didn’t even remotely seem like a choice.

In fact, it took me seven more months of abuse and a pregnancy scare to leave him for good. I learned in the domestic violence shelter how lucky I was to still have an okay job, to not have kids by him, to not be permanently injured. Or dead.

It’s beyond silly to say that any woman who is getting smacked around thinks it’s acceptable to be smacked around. No one knows better than a woman who is being abused that it is wrong. Not leaving isn’t the same as consent. I stayed because I was traumatized and isolated. I believed that Hank really loved me and that no man with less passion/ anger (those words were conflated for me) would ever love me like him.

When people act surprised that men who beat their romantic partners are charming, it makes me question their logic skills. Not all charming men are abusive, but you’re not going to have a romantic partner to beat if you’re not charming at some point. The drama and romance are often an important part. Violent and manipulative partners are not being horrible around the clock; something else draws us into them. What women would fall in love with a man that smacked her on the first date?

We want to blame the victim of domestic violence — just as I, for a long time, blamed myself. Certainly I shouldn’t have married Hank. But the world a victim lives in — a world of isolation and diminished self-esteem  — is not so simple to undo. Once the domestic violence ball is rolling, it’s awfully hard to stop.

You can learn more about abusive relationships and reach a trained counselor 24/7 at The National Domestic Violence Hotline and 1-800-799-7233. 

The author of this post chooses to be anonymous. If you would like to contact her, email Jessica@TheFrisky.com and your message will be forwarded.

EDITOR'S NOTE: "George Doe" is an American biologist who used the direct-to-consumer genetic testingservice 23andMe as part of a course he was teaching on the genome — and made a surprising discovery about his family in the process. All the names and places here have been changed to protect the privacy of George's family, though the details of their story remain in tact. Read more about how genetic testing affects families here.

I'm a stem cell and reproductive biologist. I fell in love with biology when I was in high school. It was the realization that every cell in my body has the same genome and DNA, but each cell is different. A stomach cell is not a brain cell is not a skin cell. But they're reading from the same book of instructions. With 23andMe, you get your personal genome book, your story. Unless you have an identical twin somewhere, that genetic makeup is unique to you.

Last year, I taught a course about the genome. For one of the lessons, I demonstrated the process of acquiring a tissue sample — in this case saliva — and sending it off to 23andMe to look at a million letters in my genome. 23andMe analyzes them, and spits out a report telling you things about yourself at the genetic level. Then you get the awesome bonus of learning about your ancestry: finding out which parts came from Europe, Africa, Asia.

I had spent many years looking at the genes of other animals — particularly mice — but I never looked at my own. Because I was so excited about it, I got two 23andMe kits for my mom and dad as gifts. It's a lot more fun when you can incorporate your family because you can trace not just the chromosomes but individual alleles on the chromosome so you don't just see them, but where they came from. Also, I felt I had a good handle on my family's medical history so I was very interested in confirming any susceptibility to cancers that I heard had run in my family, like colon cancer. I wanted to know if I had a genetic risk.

"I discovered through the 23andMe relative finder program that I have a half brother."

I found out I don't have any genetic predisposition to any kind of cancer, which was a great relief to me. But I also discovered through the 23andMe close relative finder program that I have a half brother, Thomas.

I have my PhD in cell and molecular biology. When I saw that I share about 22 percent of my genome with a person, I thought, "That's huge." It took a bit of time to realize Thomas and I actually share the same genome with my father. This is how it happened: when you share around 25 percent genetic similarity with someone, that means that either it's your grandfather, uncle, or half-sibling. 23andMe listed Thomas as a grandfather, which was confusing to me. I called my dad. All I had was his name, Thomas, and the fact that he's male. I just asked my dad, "Does this name sound familiar?" He said no. He logged into his account, and Thomas wasn't showing up at all. I was so confused. We figured out that at the very bottom of your profile, there's a little box that says "check this box if you want to see close family members in this search program." [Note: 23 and Me has since switched to an opt out system, where users will automatically be enrolled in the close relatives finder program.]

Dad checked it, and Thomas' name appeared in his list. 23andMe said dad was 50 percent related with Thomas and that he was a predicted son.

I freaked out. I said, "Can I call you back later?" I hung up the phone. I pulled out my genetics textbooks, called my contact at 23andMe, and asked if it was wrong. I called my sister and for three days, we agonized about what to do, we got into a fight, and thought. "Do we say something? Do we not say something?" Dad figured that because Thomas was listed as my grandfather, the company had made a mistake.

I reached out to Thomas over 23andMe and soon found out he had been adopted at birth and was searching for his birth parents for years. I immediately felt empathetic: he has his own daughter now, and they're going to the doctor and the doctor says, "Tell me about your family's med history," and he doesn't know anything. I thought, "He has a right to know. Who am I to stand in the way and say, 'You can't talk to my dad — it might hurt my feelings?'"

"Years of repressed memories and emotions uncorked and resulted in tumultuous times that have torn my nuclear family apart."

At first, I was thinking this is the coolest genetics story, my own personal genetics story. I wasn't particularly upset about it initially, until the rest of the family found out. Their reaction was different. Years of repressed memories and emotions uncorked and resulted in tumultuous times that have torn my nuclear family apart. My parents divorced. No one is talking to my dad. We're not anywhere close to being healed yet and I don't know how long it will take to put the pieces back together.

After this discovery was made, I went back to 23andMe and talked to them. I said, "I'm not sure all your customers realize that when they participate in your family finder program, what they're participating in what are essentially really advanced paternity tests." People find out that their parents aren't who they think they are. They have nearly a million people in the database. If there happens to be anyone in there you're related to, they'll find your match. This is a solid science.

The person I spoke to didn't really have a response. I don't want to say she was aloof. She just said "that's interesting." I also wanted a response about the grandfather prediction for Thomas. We all know that genetically it's hard to distinguish a son from a grandfather, but I don't think she realized what a big deal that is to get it wrong.

I don't want to say if I knew that I wouldn't have participated. But I'm really devastated at the outcome. I wrestle with these emotions. I love my family. This is nothing I ever would have wished. My dream would be to introduce Thomas to dad, to incorporate a new family tradition, to merge families. We all get to broaden our horizons and live happily ever after. At least right now, that's not what happened. I still hold out hope that in time we can resolve things. But I also worry that as these transitions happen there may have been some permanent emotional damage that may not be able to be undone.

23andMe's way of protecting people is by giving users the chance to click that box to opt into the relative finder program. I think they're trying to protect people from themselves. They believe in the power of information and of learning about yourself. Some people can't handle the information. Some people don't even know they can't handle it.

When you check that [close relatives] box it should have a bunch of stars and bells and whistles around it. Because there are plenty of people who click boxes. Nobody reads their iTunes agreement. That's how I feel about the family finder thing: you just check all the boxes, just keep doing it, and never put a whole lot of thought into the possibilities.

"I would want a warning saying, 'check this box and FYI: people discover their parents aren't their parents and they have siblings they didn't know about.'"

I would want a warning saying, "Check this box and FYI: people discover their parents aren't their parents, they have siblings they didn't know about. If you check this box, these are the things you'll find." And I'm the one with my PhD. I understand how this works. But I didn't think through all of the practical implications, in part because I thought, "This wouldn't happen to me."

The irony has not escaped me that I gave 23andMe to my parents as a gift. In my own mind, the breakup of my family has been very difficult. I talk to a counsellor regularly now. It's helpful for me to see how I deal with these issues. I had to deal with the time that I essentially gave my parents the gift of divorce.

If I had never done that, nobody would be the wiser. I thought it was a cool gift. I am a lover of science, specifically biology and genetics, and just thought I was sharing that with my family who has always wanted to understand more about what I do and love. I don't know that I would have shared if I knew this would have been the result.

One of my favorite phrases is sunlight is the best disinfectant. I still think that's true. But this has challenged that worldview. This is an example where having more information has had a negative emotional and psychological impact on me and family relationships.

Further reading: Genetic testing brings families together — and sometimes tears them apart by Julia Belluz

“Hey Fred, your beard is looking a little scraggly. Have you tried rubbing some beard oil in it? It’ll change your life, brother.”

Use the funnel to pour the oil into the bottle. Easy peasy.

32 Movies That Completely Change When You Add an Extra Letter

 

An ISIS-related Twitter account has issued the group’s first direct call for attacks on specific American targets, but it’s not going after political or national icons. It wants Twitter employees assassinated. The call for retribution against the online platform was first announced Sunday night in a series of tweets asking “lone wolves” in the U.S. and Europe to make Twitter employees the focus of their attacks.

Twitter has been engaged in a prolonged game of whack-a-mole with ISIS, closing its accounts and those of similar organizations as they come to prominence, in an attempt to stifle their extremist propaganda and exhortations to violence. ISIS and other groups have consistently thwarted these efforts, now they’re going one step further, urging “lone wolf” actors to target Twitter employees.

The series of ISIS tweets are below, translated one by one.

“#The_Concept_of_Lone_Wolf_Attacks The time has arrived to respond to Twitter’s management by directly attacking their employees and physically assassinating them!! Those who will carry this out are the sleepers cells of death.”

“#The_Concept_of_Lone_Wolf_Attacks Twitter management should know that if they do not stop their campaign in the virtual world, we will the bring the war to them in the real world on the ground.”

“#The_Concept_of_Lone_Wolf_Attacks Every Twitter employee in San Francisco in the United States should bear in mind and watch over himself because on his doorstep there might be a lone wolf assassin waiting.”

“#Attacking_Twitter_Employees is on the agenda of mujahedeen and lone wolves who are across Europe.”

The Twitter handle in question, @dawlamoon, purportedly represents Al Nusra Al Maqdisia (The Supporters of Jerusalem)—a Jerusalem-based group that pledged loyalty to ISIS in February and claimed to have participated in the Gaza war on its behalf. It is not possible to independently verify whether or not this account is a reflection of official ISIS policy, but the group and its accounts are well-known and frequently referenced in online ISIS forums. Twitter suspended the @dawlamoon account around 2 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, after the threats to Twitter staff were posted.

Followers of the account were largely ISIS sympathizers, as made clear by their iconography.

The account, for the most part, published official ISIS materials, as well as news and updates on the group’s activities in Iraq and Syria, including images from field operations. Twitter had suspended it several times, and it had reopened with slight amendments to the username. The latest iteration had nearly 3,000 followers before it was suspended. An analysis of the account revealed that over 11 percent of its interactions over the past 30 days have been with American-based accounts. A handful of those followers claimed to be in the United States. Individual users were also identified in Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany.

Twitter has been working furiously to shut down accounts that ISIS opened to use as free, instantaneous communications tools. The group’s propaganda has been extremely effective in terms of making its media and messages fit in with journalistic norms. Having to constantly fight with Twitter’s internal police is an increasing source of frustration for ISIS, it seems.

ISIS is constantly ducking Twitter’s efforts to shut it out of the platform, and that running online battle has become a hot topic in the ISIS forums Vocativ monitors. The group constantly advises its followers on how to avoid account suspensions and what to do if accounts are closed down. The techniques are simple but effective; opening new accounts by subtly changing names, usernames, passwords and pictures of suspended accounts, using numerals to replace letters and changing one character to create a similar username.

• DNA evidence on a shawl found at Ripper murder scene nails killer
• By testing descendants of victim and suspect, identifications were made
• Jack the Ripper has been identified as Polish-born Aaron Kosminski
• Kosminski was a suspect when the Ripper murders took place in 1888
• Hairdresser Kosminski lived in Whitechapel and was later put in an asylum

By Russell Edwards For Mail On Sunday

Published: 16:01 EST, 6 September 2014 | Updated: 17:55 EST, 6 September 2014

GUILTY: A DNA sample has proven Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper

It is the greatest murder mystery of all time, a puzzle that has perplexed criminologists for more than a century and spawned books, films and myriad theories ranging from the plausible to the utterly bizarre.

But now, thanks to modern forensic science, The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer responsible for  at least five grisly murders in Whitechapel in East London during the autumn of 1888.

DNA evidence has now  shown beyond reasonable doubt which one of six key suspects commonly cited in connection with the Ripper’s reign of terror was the actual killer – and we reveal his identity.

A shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s victims, has been analysed and found to contain DNA from her blood as well as DNA from the killer.

The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes.

Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match.

The revelation puts an end to the fevered speculation over the Ripper’s identity which has lasted since his murderous rampage in the most impoverished and dangerous streets of London.

In the intervening century, a Jack the Ripper industry has grown up, prompting a dizzying array of more than 100 suspects, including Queen Victoria’s grandson – Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence – the post-Impressionist painter Walter Sickert, and the former Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone.

It was March 2007, in an  auction house in Bury St Edmunds, that I first saw the blood-soaked shawl. It was  in two surprisingly large  sections – the first measuring 73.5in by 25.5in, the second 24in by 19in – and, despite its stains, far prettier than any artefact connected to Jack the Ripper might be expected to be. It was mostly blue and dark brown, with a delicate  pattern of Michaelmas daisies – red, ochre and gold – at either end.

It was said to have been found next to the body of one of the Ripper’s victims, Catherine Eddowes, and soaked in her blood. There was no evidence for its provenance, although after the auction I obtained a letter from its previous owner who claimed his ancestor had been a police officer present at the murder scene and had taken it from there.

Yet I knew I wanted to buy the shawl and was prepared to pay a great deal of money for it. I hoped somehow to prove that it was genuine. Beyond that, I hadn’t considered the possibilities. I certainly had no idea that this flimsy, badly stained, and incomplete piece of material would lead to the solution to the most famous murder mystery of all time: the identification of Jack the Ripper.

Gruesome: A contemporary engraving of a Jack the Ripper crime scene in London's Whitechapel

When my involvement in the 126-year-old case began, I was just another armchair detective, interested enough to conduct my own extensive research after watching the Johnny Depp film From Hell in 2001. It piqued my curiosity about the 1888 killings when five – possibly more – prostitutes were butchered in London’s East End.

Despite massive efforts by the police, the perpetrator evaded capture, spawning the mystery which has fuelled countless books, films, TV programmes and tours of Whitechapel. Theories about his identity have been virtually limitless, with everyone from Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, to Lewis Carroll being named as possible suspects. As time has passed, the name Jack the Ripper has become synonymous with the devil himself; his crimes setting the gruesome standard against which other horrific murders are judged.

I joined the armies of those fascinated by the mystery and researching the Ripper became a hobby. I visited the National Archives in Kew to view as much of the original paperwork as still exists, noting how many of the authors of books speculating about the Ripper had not bothered to do this. I was convinced that there must be something, somewhere that had been missed.

By 2007, I felt I had exhausted all avenues until I read a newspaper article about the sale of a shawl connected to the Ripper case. Its owner, David Melville-Hayes, believed it had been in his family’s possession since the murder of Catherine Eddowes, when his ancestor, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, asked his superiors if he could take it home to give to his wife, a dressmaker.

Incredibly, it was stowed without ever being washed, and was handed down from David’s great-grandmother, Mary Simpson, to his grandmother, Eliza Smith, and then his mother, Eliza Mills, later Hayes.

In 1991, David gave it to Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum, where it was placed in storage rather than on display because of the lack of proof of its provenance. In 2001, David reclaimed it, and it was exhibited at the annual Jack the Ripper conference. One forensic test was carried out on it for a Channel 5 documentary in 2006, using a simple cotton swab from a randomly chosen part of the shawl, but it was inconclusive.

Most Ripper experts dismissed it when it came up for auction, but I believed I had hit on something no one else had noticed which linked it to the Ripper. The shawl is patterned with Michaelmas daisies. Today the Christian feast of Michaelmas is archaic, but in Victorian times it was familiar as a quarter day, when rents and debts were due.

I discovered there were two dates for it: one, September 29, in the Western Christian church and the other, November 8, in the Eastern Orthodox church. With a jolt, I realised the two dates coincided precisely with the nights of the last two murder dates. September 29 was the night on which Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were killed, and November 8 was the night of the final, most horrific of the murders, that of Mary Jane Kelly.

Found at the scene: Russel Edwards holds the shawl he bought in 2007, allegedly handed down from a policeman who took it from the scene, which had the incriminating DNA on it

I reasoned that it made no sense for Eddowes to have owned the expensive shawl herself; this was a woman so poor she had pawned her shoes the day before her murder. But could the Ripper have brought the shawl with him and left it as an obscure clue about when he was planning to strike next? It was just a hunch, and far from proof of anything, but it set me off on my journey.

Before buying it, I spoke to Alan McCormack, the officer in charge of the Crime Museum, also known as the Black Museum. He told me the police had always believed they knew the identity of the Ripper. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, the officer in charge of the investigation, had named him in his notes: Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew who had fled to London with his family, escaping the Russian pogroms, in the early 1880s.

Kosminski has always been one of the three most credible suspects. He is often described as having been a hairdresser in Whitechapel, the occupation written on his admission papers to the workhouse in 1890. What is certain is he was seriously mentally ill, probably a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered auditory hallucinations and described as a misogynist prone to ‘self-abuse’ – a euphemism for masturbation.

McCormack said police did not have enough evidence to convict Kosminski, despite identification by a witness, but kept him under 24-hour surveillance until he was committed to mental asylums for the rest of his life. I became convinced Kosminski was our man, and I was excited at the prospect of proving it. I felt sure that modern science would be able to produce real evidence from the stains on the shawl. After  a few false starts, I found a scientist I hoped could help.

Dr Jari Louhelainen is a leading expert in genetic evidence from historical crime scenes, combining his day job as senior lecturer in molecular biology at Liverpool John Moores University with working on cold cases for Interpol and other projects. He agreed to conduct tests on the shawl in his spare time.

The tests began in 2011, when Jari used special photographic analysis to establish what the stains were.

Using an infrared camera, he was able to tell me the dark stains were not just blood, but consistent with arterial blood spatter caused by slashing – exactly the grim death Catherine Eddowes had met.

But the next revelation was the most heart-stopping. Under UV photography, a set of fluorescent stains showed up which Jari said had the characteristics of semen. I’d never expected to find evidence of the Ripper himself, so this was thrilling, although Jari cautioned me that more testing was required before any conclusions could be drawn.

Obsession: Russell Edwards points to Hambury Street where one of the murders took place

He also found evidence of split body parts during the frenzied attack. One of Eddowes’ kidneys was removed by her murderer, and later in his research Jari managed to identify the presence of what he believed to be a kidney cell.

It was impossible to extract DNA from the stains on the shawl using the method employed in current cases, in which swabs are taken. The samples were just too old.

Instead, he used a method he called ‘vacuuming’, using a pipette filled with a special ‘buffering’ liquid that removed the genetic material in the cloth without damaging it.

As a non-scientist, I found myself in a new world as Jari warned that it would also be impossible to use genomic DNA, which is used in fresh cases and contains a human’s entire genetic data, because over time it would have become fragmented.

But he explained it would be possible to use mitochondrial DNA instead. It is passed down exclusively through the female line, is much more abundant than genomic DNA, and survives far better.

This meant that in order to give us something to test against, I had to trace a direct descendant through the female line of Catherine Eddowes. Luckily, a woman named Karen Miller, the three-times great-granddaughter of Eddowes, had featured in a documentary about the Ripper’s victims, and agreed to provide a sample of her DNA.

Jari managed to get six complete DNA profiles from the shawl, and when he tested them against Karen’s they were a perfect match.

It was an amazing breakthrough. We now knew that the shawl was authentic, and was at the scene of the crime in September 1888, and had the victim’s blood on it. On its own, this made it the single most important artefact in Ripper history: nothing else has ever been linked scientifically to the scene of any of the crimes.

Months of research on the shawl, including analysing the dyes used, had proved that it was made in Eastern Europe in the early 19th Century. Now it was time to attempt to prove that it contained the killer’s DNA.

The suspects: The long line of men believed to be Jack the Ripper include, from top left to right, Prince Albert Victor, Edward VII’s son, allegedly driven by syphilis-induced madness, Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s doctor, painter Walter Sickert, a Jewish shoemaker, a polish barber who later poisoned three women - and Kosminski

Jari used the same extraction method on the semen traces on the shawl, warning that the likelihood of sperm lasting all that time was very slim. He enlisted the help of Dr David Miller, a world expert on the subject, and in 2012 they made another incredible breakthrough when they found surviving cells. They were from the epithelium, a type of tissue which coats organs. In this case, it was likely to have come from the urethra during ejaculation.

Kosminski was 23 when the murders took place, and living with his two brothers and a sister in Greenfield Street, just 200 yards from where the third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was killed. As a key suspect, his life story has long been known, but I also researched his family. Eventually, we tracked down a young woman whose identity I am protecting – a British descendant of Kosminski’s sister, Matilda, who would share his mitochondrial DNA. She provided me with swabs from the inside of her mouth.

Amplifying and sequencing the DNA from the cells found on the shawl took months of painstaking, innovative work. By that point, my excitement had reached fever-pitch. And when the email finally arrived telling me Jari had found a perfect match, I was overwhelmed. Seven years after I bought the shawl, we had nailed Aaron Kosminski.

As a scientist, Jari is naturally  cautious, unwilling to let his imagination run away without testing every minute element, but even he declared the finding ‘one hell of a masterpiece’. I celebrated by visiting the East End, wandering the streets where Kosminski lived, worked and committed his despicable crimes, feeling a sense of euphoria but also disbelief that we had unmasked the Ripper.

Kosminski was not a member of the Royal Family, or an eminent  surgeon or politician. Serial killers rarely are. Instead, he was a pathetic creature, a lunatic who achieved sexual satisfaction from slashing women to death in the most brutal manner. He died in Leavesden  Asylum from gangrene at the age of 53, weighing just 7st.

No doubt a slew of books and films will now emerge to speculate on his personality and motivation. I have  no wish to do so. I wanted to provide real answers using scientific evidence, and I’m overwhelmed that 126 years on, I have solved the mystery.

Shawl that nailed Polish lunatic Aaron Kosminski and the forensic expert that made the critical match

By Dr Jari Louhelainen

Evidence: Russell points to the part of the shawl where DNA was found

When Russell Edwards first approached me in 2011, I wasn’t aware of the massive levels of interest in the Ripper case, as I’m a scientist originally from Finland.

But by early this year, when I realised we were on the verge of making a big discovery, working on the shawl had taken over my life, occupying me from early in the morning until late at night.

It has taken a great deal of hard work, using cutting-edge scientific techniques which would not have been possible five years ago.

To extract DNA samples from the stains on the shawl, I used a technique I developed myself, which I call ‘vacuuming’ – to pull the original genetic material  from the depths of the cloth.

I filled a sterile pipette with a  liquid ‘buffer’, a solution known to stabilise the cells and DNA, and injected it into the cloth to dissolve the material trapped in the weave of the fabric without damaging  the cells, then sucked it out. 

I needed to sequence the DNA found in the stains on the shawl, which means mapping the DNA by determining the exact order  of the bases in a strand. I used polymerase chain reaction, a technique which allows millions  of exact copies of the DNA to be made, enough for sequencing.

When I tested the resulting  DNA profiles against the DNA taken from swabs from Catherine Eddowes’s descendant, they were a match.

I used the same extraction method on the stains which had characteristics of seminal fluid.

Dr David Miller found epithelial cells – which line cavities and organs – much to our surprise, as we were not expecting to find anything usable after 126 years.

Then I used a new process called whole genome amplification to copy the DNA 500 million-fold and allow it to be profiled.

Once I had the profile, I could compare it to that of the female descendant of Kosminski’s sister, who had given us a sample of  her DNA swabbed from inside  her mouth.

The first strand of DNA showed a 99.2 per cent match, as the analysis instrument could not determine the sequence of the missing 0.8 per cent fragment  of DNA. On testing the second strand, we achieved a perfect  100 per cent match.

Because of the genome amplification technique, I was also able to ascertain the ethnic and geographical background of the DNA I extracted. It was of a type known as the haplogroup T1a1, common in people of Russian Jewish ethnicity. I was even able to establish that he had dark hair.

Now that it’s over, I’m excited and proud of what we’ve achieved, and satisfied that we have established, as far as we possibly can, that Aaron Kosminski is  the culprit.

Dr Jari Louhelainen is a senior lecturer in molecular biology at Liverpool John Moores University and an expert in historic cold-case forensic research.

© Russell Edwards 2014

Naming Jack The Ripper,  by Russell Edwards, will be  published by Sidgwick & Jackson on September 9, priced £16.99.

While popular phones, laptops, PCs and music players have changed significantly in the last 10 years, the TI-84 Plus has remained more or less a constant.

In the ruthlessly competitive world of technology, where companies rush the latest gadget to market and slash prices to stay competitive, the TI-84 Plus is an anomaly.

Texas Instruments released the graphing calculator in 2004, and continues to sell it today. The base model still has 480 kilobytes of ROM and 24 kilobytes of RAM. Its black-and-white screen remains 96×64 pixels. For 10 years its MSRP has been $150, but depending on the retailer, today it generally sells for between $90 and $120. The only changes have come in software updates.

Amazon calls the TI-84 Plus a No. 1 best-seller. Texas Instruments says that this year the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition has become its best-selling calculator, and that the TI-84 is its most popular family of calculators. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition is slightly more expensive than the base model, has a color screen, rechargeable battery and significantly more memory.

Even with a 320×240 pixel screen, 128 kilobytes RAM and 4 megabytes ROM, overall the TI-84 line of calculators appears unnecessarily expensive given the components. Apple — which is notorious for high margins on its products — sells an iPod touch for $199 that comes with 16 gigabytes of memory and a four-inch screen with a resolution of 1136-by-640 pixels. That’s a dramatically better piece of hardware with a less significant gap in price.

Electronics almost universally become cheaper over time. But with essentially a monopoly on graphing calculator usage in classrooms, Texas Instruments can charge a premium. Texas Instruments accounted for 93 percent of the U.S. graphing calculator sales from July 2013-June 2014. Casio took the other 7 percent, according to NPD data. During that period 1.6 million graphing calculators were sold, a decrease from sales of 1.67 million during July 2011-June 2012.

Calculators are a small slice of Texas Instruments’ overall business, but a very lucrative one. It’s difficult to determine exactly how profitable calculators are for the company as it lumps them in “other” on its financial reports. The “other” division had an operating profit of 30.8 percent in 2013, making it Texas Instruments’ most profitable division.

“Compared to other electronics this day and age there is very little content,” said Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis of the TI-84 Plus. “Plastic case, small black and white screen, two semiconductor chips. The batteries are even not rechargeable like a cell phone.” He estimates a TI-84 Plus costs $15-20 to manufacture and has a profit margin of over 50 percent for Texas Instruments.

For comparison sake, PC makers have margins under 3 percent. Texas Instruments declined to comment on its costs and profit margins for the TI-84 Plus calculator.

“There are alternatives but TI became the dominant player in school calculators as schools needed to standardize on one design and TI won out,” said Curtis, who follows Texas Instruments for Barclays.

Texas Instruments has been so dominant in part because of its ecosystem around its calculators, which keeps teachers and students happy with services such as 1-800-TI-CARES. Since 1986 more than 100,000 U.S. teachers have partaken in Teachers Teaching with Technology, which offers workshops in person and online to educate teachers on how to teach effectively with Texas Instruments calculators.

Once Texas Instruments had teachers and school districts comfortable with its calculators, offering low prices or cutting-edge hardware weren’t required to run a successful business.

“We have to keep evolving on this platform, but it can’t be innovation for the sake of innovation,” said Peter Balyta, president of Texas Instruments’ calculator division. “While it’s tempting for us to build in WiFi, Bluetooth, audio, a camera, a whole bunch of things, we could do, but teachers don’t want us to. And it’s because we want to have a tool that kids can use in a classroom, on their way home, at home when they’re doing homework and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.”

Students don’t need a supercomputer for their Algebra homework, but a more competitive graphing calculator landscape would likely aid students who struggle to pay $100 for a calculator.

Casio wants to compete with Texas Instruments on price. Its competitor for the TI-84 Plus, the fx-9860GII, has an MSRP of $79.99. Its best-selling model, the fx-9750 GII, has an MSRP of $49.99. Despite the lower prices Casio says it still turns a profit on sales of the calculators.

But graphing calculators are a market where price isn’t especially important. Parents — not teachers — end up paying for whatever graphing calculator is required. If you’re asking someone else to buy something, you may not be overly focused on whether they’re getting a great deal.

“To switch over to a Casio, even though we do say it is easier to use, there is a little bit of a learning curve, the system set-ups are just slightly different. That is one thing we do struggle with, teachers worried about how long it is going to take them to learn,” said Amy Chow, Casio’s national training coordinator. The company hopes to convince teachers of its calculators’ merit, so its market share will grow.

Smartphones have steadily eliminated the need for other electronics, be it wristwatches, cameras or flashlights. Could graphing calculators be next? The average smartphone today has gobs more memory and a sharper screen than any graphing calculator on the market. Free graphing calculator apps are available. But smartphones can’t be used on standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT. Schools are understandably reluctant to let them be used in classrooms, where students may opt to tune out in class and instead text friends or play games.

So for now, overpriced hardware and all, the TI-84 family of calculators remains on top and unlikely to go anywhere.

Matt McFarland is the editor of Innovations. He's always looking for the next big thing. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook.

Tata. Honolulu. Stanley. Those are, respectively, Barack Obama's first pet, city of birth, and the first name of his maternal grandfather. I found all three facts with five minutes of Googling. And if President Obama had his online accounts set up the same way most of us do (he doesn't, thankfully), I might have just gotten the skeleton key to his entire digital life.

Security questions are one of the age-old institutions of digital authentication. Their flaws are well documented — answers are easy to guess or look up, they're easily bypassed in the event of a brute-force hack, and companies themselves seem not to take them seriously — and yet, they're still used everywhere. But their role in the hacking of celebrity iCloud accounts to find huge troves of nude pictures should be the last straw. It's time to kill the security question, once and for all.

We don't know yet exactly how the accounts of Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and other female celebrities were compromised. But it seems clear, both from Apple's statement on the matter and from the stated methods of similar hackers, that security questions played a big role in allowing hackers to gain access to their iCloud backups. To put it simply: In order to pull off most types of hacks, you first need to get a user's password. And although other methods for getting passwords exist (like phishing over email or writing scripts that will try thousands of possible combinations), the easiest way for a hacker to gain access is simply to guess the answers to a user's security questions, and — when he's gotten them right — to reset the password to one of his choosing.

Two caveats to this argument: First, to harp on the systematic flaws of Apple's user protections — and point out the absurdity of its "targeted attack" blame-shifting — isn't to lessen the gravity of the hackers' criminal acts, which may have been possible even under a stronger authentication system. And second, as Mat Honan has pointed out, security questions aren't the only problem with the modern password regime — but they are the most obvious place to start fixing it.

Questions like "What is your mother's maiden name?" and "What is the name of the hospital in which you were born?" are an artifact from the early days of the internet. (It's telling that many of the typical security questions were written in an age in which most women changed their last names when getting married, and it was taken as a given that children were born in hospitals.) Back then, they were used mainly by banks and credit-card companies and were called "out-of-wallet questions," since the answers would be known only to the account holder and not, say, to someone who had stolen the account holder's wallet. 

Even in the good old days, security questions protected users mostly from threats from prying strangers, rather than all possible hackers. (A mugger wouldn't know your mom's maiden name, but your estranged brother would.) But today, in an age when most people's basic biographical information is available online in some form, security questions are fairly useless. As The Atlantic wrote in 2012, a study by Microsoft Research found that users' acquaintances could guess the answers to their security questions 17 percent of the time. Strangers guessed the correct answers within five tries 13 percent of the time.

Celebrities and public figures are particularly vulnerable to attacks based on these questions since so much of their personal information is publicly available. But as Sam Biddle writes at Valleywag, everyone's a potential target — and creeps on image boards like AnonIB have been exploiting security questions to gain the passwords and rip the iCloud backups of non-famous women as well.

Security questions are a form of what's called "knowledge-based authentication" — identity-verification tools that rely on information that is only known by an account bearer. (Another example would be Facebook's odd photo-tag recognition test.) The problem with knowledge-based authentication is that in today's world of widely shared personal information, single-party questions are harder to find. Try to think of one fact about yourself that you, and only you, know. Your favorite food? Your first boss? The location of your hidden tattoo?

Guessing this information wouldn't be hard for your ex, your best friend, or someone who could view your Instagram history, your LinkedIn profile, or your Facebook photos and piece the information together. The security questions that would truly be answerable only by you — "What's your favorite porn site?" "Which prescription drugs do you take?" — aren't the kinds of things you're likely to share with a website.

The standard security question could be improved by allowing users to create their own questions or by beefing questions up with some kind of location data (i.e., to recover your password, type the name of the last foreign country you visited — your iCloud account pulls this information from your iPhone's metadata). But really, security questions should go away altogether. They're so dangerous that many security experts recommend filling in random gibberish instead of real answers — in other words, you're safer having no security questions than using them as intended.

There are all kinds of ways to lock down your most important accounts — Gizmodo's guide is a good place to start. Two-factor authentication (the option to have a one-time code sent to your phone, which you then use to log in to your account in conjunction with your password) is important, even though it wouldn't have helped in the case of the recent iCloud break-in. And, eventually, some advanced form of biometric authentication (fingerprints, retina scans) may become standard, and security questions may get phased out altogether.

But until then, when so many better options exist, there's no reason a company like Apple should be relying on questions like "What was the model of your first car?" for password recovery in 2014. If that's the best way we have of making sure a user is legit, we might as well change all of our passwords to "1234" and hope for the best.

Apple has responded to this week’s hackings of celebrity iCloud accounts, which resulted in postings of private photographs. Here’s Apple’s statement in full:

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–We wanted to provide an update to our investigation into the theft of photos of certain celebrities. When we learned of the theft, we were outraged and immediately mobilized Apple’s engineers to discover the source. Our customers’ privacy and security are of utmost importance to us. After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud® or Find my iPhone. We are continuing to work with law enforcement to help identify the criminals involved.

To protect against this type of attack, we advise all users to always use a strong password and enable two-step verification. Both of these are addressed on our website at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4232.

Apple says that it conducted an investigation for more than 40 hours, and denies that iCloud or Find my iPhone was actually breached. Apple is presenting this as a very targeted username, password, and security questions hack on “certain celebrity accounts.” Apple recommends that users utilize the 2-step verification service for Apple IDs/iCloud. The company also says it is continuing to work with law enforcement on finding the hackers involved.