NARRATOR: Examiners need a way to expose more of fingerprints unique details.

Akhlesh Lakhtakia and his team at Penn State University's Materials Research Institute are eyeing a new technology that promises to do just that.

His project got wings from a fly. A fly's ability to elude capture fascinated Lakhtakia since he was a boy.

AKHLESH LAKHTAKIA (Pennsylvania State University): Before you can approach the fly, the fly has seen you, somehow or the other, and has flown off.

NARRATOR: Lakhtakia wonders if the structure of the fly's eye gives it a unique ability to see predators approaching from all angles. To find out, he turns to an ultrathin material called C.T.F., columnar thin film, to make an impression of the minutest contours of the fly's cornea.

Each square inch of the film contains billions of glass bristles. It forms a layer 200 times thinner than a sheet of paper.

When it coats the fly's eye, the bristles conform to every peak and valley. The result is that microscopic nooks and crannies show up in stunning three-dimensional detail.

The technology isn't helping Lakhtakia catch flies, but it does give him an idea for how to catch criminals. Could this technology be used to get the same incredible detail from a fingerprint?

AKHLESH LAKHTAKIA: This film would reproduce the topographic features, the geography, if you will, of ridges in the fingerprint.

NARRATOR: If C.T.F. can capture a fingerprint, it could revolutionize forensics. But will it work?

The team places a fingerprint on a glass slide. The slide is loaded into a chamber called a thermal evaporator. Inside the evaporator, the fingerprint is sprayed with a microscopically thin layer of vaporized glass. Unlike superglue, the glass does not chemically alter the oils that form the print.

After about 30 minutes, the glass bristles harden into an ultrathin film that preserves minute details. Even with the naked eye, the C.T.F. print reveals ridges that would be missing in a superglue print.

AKHLESH LAKHTAKIA: With the new technique, the ridges are far more prominent. You can see creases. Like, this is a crease, this is a crease, this is another crease.

NARRATOR: Under a microscope, there are exponentially more ridgelines.