Tiny Cilia Inside Corpse' Noses Could Be a More Reliable Indicator of Time of Death
The Body May Expire, But the Nasal Cilia Continue On Thomy pc via Wikimedia Despite how easy they make it look on TV dramas, determining time of death for a body requires a lot of difficult guesswork (unless someone is there when the person passes, of course). A range of environmental factors and other mitigating circumstances make any declaration of time of death an estimation at best. But a team of Italian scientists think they've found a built-in clock in the human nasal cavity that ticks off the minutes after a body expires, and it could make estimating the time of death a more precise exercise. There are several ways for forensic examiners to roughly gauge time of death--decomposition rate, the state of rigor mortis, body temperature--but the specific circumstances of death can often influence those indicators, introducing variables that are difficult to account for. But researchers at the University of...