An unlikely new toolkit of pigs’ trotters and nicotine is helping forensic scientists to pinpoint the time of death in suspicious cases.

Calculating the post-mortem interval (PMI) – the time that has elapsed since someone has died – is one of the most important pieces of information to be established from a crime scene, yet it is one of the hardest to find out. That’s because the longer a body lies undiscovered, the less reliable methods of dating become. What’s more, when bodies are buried in clandestine graves, methods for determining PMI can become unreliable for various reasons: telltale insect activity be be less than expected, for instance, or it can be hard to tell whether the body was moved from another location.

But Christopher Rogers from the University of Wolverhampton, UK, thinks forensic scientists are missing a trick. “Cartilage has received very little research regarding post-mortem processes. However, it has great potential,” he says.

He reckons cartilage could be particularly useful because it doesn’t have a blood supply, so it breaks down more slowly than other tissues. And the soft tissues that protect it minimise external contamination.

Shallow graves

To test this theory, Rogers and colleagues buried pig trotters in soil to simulate human burial in shallow graves. They left the trotters to decompose for varying lengths of time up to 13 weeks.

The results, presented today at the Forensic Research and Teaching conference in Coventry, UK, show that cartilage decomposes in several distinct stages. Importantly, mineral crystals formed on the cartilage after three weeks and disappeared after six, providing a clear “time stamp”.

Rogers believes the crystals could make cartilage analysis a useful tool in determining the PMI, but stresses that the same study needs to be carried out in different conditions, such as different temperatures and soil types, to check whether results are consistent.

Michael Wysocki, a forensic scientist from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK, agrees that it’s early days: “The quest for techniques which give reliable and precise estimations of PMI, particularly in the case of buried human remains, is a holy grail of forensic taphonomy [the study of fossilisation]. This work appears to have potential, but is at an early stage and requires more experimentation and fine tuning.”

The nicotine effect

In a separate study at Nottingham Trent University, UK, Andrew Chick has been asking whether smoking affects PMI calculations. Forensic scientists often look at the insects feeding on a corpse to work out the time of death, but nicotine in the body of a smoker could affect the insects’ behaviour and so throw time-of-death estimates out.

To find out more, Chick and his colleagues have laid three dead pigs in woodland. Two of the pigs have been injected with nicotine in the throat, to mimic the area where the largest build-up of nicotine would be expected in humans, and the third was left nicotine-free (see video, above).

The research will be carried out over five years, but the team have already unearthed some interesting preliminary results. Sure enough, flies avoided the nicotine-treated areas at first, and when they do lay their eggs there, they deposit solo eggs rather than customary clumps. When maggots hatch, they seem to avoid feeding on the nicotine-rich area, and beetles stay away too. Together, these results mean that smokers’ bodies might decompose more slowly than those of non-smokers.

If repeat experiments support these findings, forensic scientists will need to differentiate between the bodies of people who smoke and those who don’t, says Chick. Other chemicals could cause similar errors too. “There is evidence in the literature that illegal drugs have an effect on the way bodies decompose: cocaine, for example, increases the size of maggots.”

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via Nicotine and pigs’ trotters: the latest CSI toolkit – life – 01 July 2010 – New Scientist.

You may be able to buy gold from vending machines, but you certainly cant have it for dessert. If you have a sweet tooth, look no further than the MooBella Ice Creamery machine that instantly aerates, flavors and flash freezes ice cream. You pick either the premium or light version, select one of the 12 different flavors and any one of the three mix-in ingredients using the touchscreen. By the time youve read up to here, your custom-made treat is ready for you, all in under 40 seconds. According to the manufacturer, the ingredients for the instant ice cream maker are shipped in aseptic packaging which requires no refrigeration, making it more cost-effective to transport and less damaging to the environment. These machines are currently built for high-volume purposes such as college campuses and hospitals in the US, and are able to dispense 200 servings before they need to be refilled. Which means you wont be able to get one of these for your home. The cost of each serving is about US$2.85. The modular design of the machines makes it easy for maintenance and the company expects to roll out credit/debit/card payment methods later this year. It also plans to further expand on the technology to spit out yogurts, sorbets or even cosmetics in the future.

via Ice cream on demand in 40 seconds – Lifestyle – Crave – CNET Asia.

After the “underwear bomber” incident on Christmas Day, President Obama accelerated the deployment of new airport scanners that look beneath travelers' clothes to spot any weapons or explosives.

Fifty-two of these state-of-the-art machines are already scanning passengers at 23 U.S. airports. By the end of 2011, there will be 1,000 machines and two out of every three passengers will be asked to step into one of the new machines for a six-second head-to-toe scan before boarding.

About half of these machines will be so-called X-ray back-scatter scanners. They use low-energy X-rays to peer beneath passengers' clothing. That has some scientists worried.

via Scientists Question Safety Of New Airport Scanners : NPR.

They Might Be Giants continues its cerebral dominance of the pop music world with Here Comes Science, a CD/DVD release created for kids but smart enough for the adults in the mosh pit.

Exclusively available digitally on iTunes and physically on Amazon.com starting Tuesday, the follow-up to John Flansburgh and John Linnell’s Grammy-winning 2008 effort Here Come the 123s builds on the brainy foundation laid down by the band more than 25 years ago. But since the subject this time around is science, They Might Be Giants‘ latest sonic workbook might not go over too well with the intelligent-design crowd.

(read more @ Underwire – Wired.com)

And here’s a great animation video from the album:

Big-picture thinking and inventiveness are going to be the key to professional success in a new “conceptual age.” In a series of posts over at WebWorkerDaily, Imran Ali has been musing on the type of work that we might be doing in the future, the skills that will be required, and the type of teams we might be working in. The skills we need could evolve, Imran pointed out, citing career analyst Daniel Pink’s assertion that “right-brainers will rule this century.” In his book, Pink states that we’ll need to augment our “left-brained” reasoning with six crucial “right-brained” skills: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.

(read more @ gigaom & Web Worker Daily)

It is the norm in the fictional world of Harry Potter: the magical daily newspaper where words and pictures come to life in the reader’s hands.

Now a revolutionary technology means that the moving imagery inThe Daily Prophet is set to become a reality. A Cambridge-based company is months away from launching the world’s first flexible electronic screen.

Designed by scientists at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, to compete with the growing variety of electronic books from the likes of Sony and the US-only Amazon Kindle, the roll up A4-sized “intelligent plastic” display has taken a decade of development and cost £120 million. It is the first screen to be made from a microchip not of silicon but of cheap plastic.

(read more @ Times Online and Plastic Logic)

A Taser stun gun capable of shocking three people without being reloaded has been unveiled. The demonstration at the Scottsdale-based company’s annual conference was performed by Taser International chairman Tom Smith, and his brother, CEO Rick Smith, who says the device will become the new standard for police officers who want greater tactical abilities.

(read more @ Yahoo News)

Samsung has a new phone coming out, but you would have never guessed it by the buzz surrounding the presentations the company has been giving. At product launches in London, Dubai, and Singapore, Samsung partnered up with Korean design firm d’strict to showcase its Jet phone in a holographic-like interactive display that’s one part Star Trek Holodeck, one part Project Natal, three parts awesome.

(read more @ PC World and d’strict)

Here is the presentation:

And here is the ad film for the phone itself (which also seems awesome, by the way):

The seating arrangements are compared to airport traffic patterns. The student schedules are called playlists. And lesson plans are generated by a complicated computer algorithm for the 80 studentsin the class.

This could be the school of the future, according to the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, who visited Middle School 131 in Chinatownon Tuesday to promote a pilot program, the School of One.

The program, conducted in a converted library, consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers to complete math lessons in the form of quizzes, games and worksheets. Each student must take a quiz at the end of each day; the results are fed into a computer program to determine whether they will move on to a new topic the next day.

Mr. Klein said the program would allow learning in a way that no traditional classroom can, because it tailors each lesson to a student’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the child’s interests.

(read more @ NY Times)

Designer Chiyu Chen has conceived of an ingenious transit system that encourages the use of sustainable transportation by crediting people for renting and riding bicycles. His Hybrid2 system consists of a fleet of rentable bicycles that are capable of generating and storing kinetic energy, which is then used to power the city’s hybrid electric buses.

(read more and see more pics @ inhabitat)