Portable Time of Death Device

Advancements in the world of forensic science have recently been invested into developing a device that will allow forensic scientists to find a body and estimate a time of death immediately on the scene. In theory this device will detect gasses released by the body immediately upon death, allowing for the discovery of bodies more efficiently than before.

The need for such a device has been brought about by the problems that arise from relying primarily on cadaver dogs for body searches. In simple murder or accident cases, such dogs can be very useful as they are very reliable. Though when the scale is magnified, such as in disasters involving tornadoes or earthquakes, where many bodies need to be found as quickly as possible. the game changes dramatically. In such cases, the dogs become expensive, time consuming, and prone to error from fatigue. The devices being developed would be much more cost effective and all around accurate.

Scientists are developing these devices by doing research on freshly donated bodies and pigs, which decompose at extraordinarily similar rates and in identical stages to humans. They have so far discovered that the body releases over 30 different gases upon death, and are currently working to identify and classify and all of them according to how long they appear after death. It will be interesting to see how the study on developing this device will proceed.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090816211837.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05obdead.html?ref=science

It appears that ants in Argentina have mysterious ways of detecting if their fellows are deceased or not. A study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows that when ants die, their bodies activate a sort of "dead man's switch" that is activated when the ant dies. This "switch" causes the ant to stop producing certain identifying chemicals that indicate to its hive mates that it is alive, identifying it as dead and causing its mates to carry it off away from the hive.

At first, scientists believed that ants simply reacted to the release of fatty acids and other such chemical cues from decomposition to determine weather or not their fellows were alive or not. Though further observation showed that ants carried away the deceased within an hour, way too soon for decomposition to even begin taking place. Thus led scientists to examine even further and discover that in life, ants produce two different compounds on their feelers which indicate that they are alive, and when these ants die the production of these two chemicals shuts off, indicating their death. It is interesting to see how chemical reactions are important to even the smallest of life forms.