This winter, a biotechnology company began offering a whole new service to police departments. Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs' Snapshot service allows police to send Parabon NanoLabs DNA samples taken from crime scenes. From that DNA, the company reconstructs a guess of what the person's face looks like.

"It's giving investigators new leads," Ellen McRae Greytak, Parabon's director of bioinformatics, tells Popular Science. "The idea of Snapshot is to give investigators a new way to use DNA."

Parabon NanoLabs has worked on 10 cases, each for different U.S. police departments, Greytak says. The first department to release a face prediction publicly is the Columbia, South Carolina, police. The department published this poster made from the DNA of a "person of interest" in the unsolved murder of 25-year-old Candra Alston and her three-year-old daughter in 2011: