Emerging scientific technologies help defend human rights

AAAS analyst assists a human rights organization in gathering data during an exhumation. Against a backdrop of summer heat and a constant roar of distant howler monkeys, a scientific analyst piloted a drone to collect data from a hillside in northern Guatemala. At his side, anthropologists affiliated with a regional human rights group painstakingly cleared soil and roots from human remains in a mass grave. "Remains contorted, overlapping, interlaced, a cruel, tragic mashup of Hieronymus Bosch and H.R. Giger," noted Jonathan Drake, senior program associate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Geospatial Technologies Project, summoning images from 15th- and 20th-century artists to describe the nightmarish remnants of an atrocity estimated to have occurred sometime after 1980, during Guatemala's lengthy civil war. Clothing with burnt edges stuck to the bones of some.