HOW do homicide detectives know how long a person has been dead? In the first
12 to 24 hours after death, visible changes in the body give an accurate enough
estimate. But when corpses are days or weeks old it becomes more difficult
because the complex chemistry of decay takes over and no one understands very
much about it.
But now chemists, anthropologists and other scientists in Tennessee are
working on a project to develop a device they could “wave over a body” to detect
how long the person has been dead. Arpad Vass of the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory,…
