Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Dating Forensic Death Based On Corpse Microorganisms

A group of scientists of the University of Granada has developed a new technique of forensic dating based on thermo-microbiology, which will allow to determine more accurately the time of a death which has not occurred under controlled natural conditions or as a consequence of a crime. To carry out this work, the authors analysed about 240 microorganic samples taken from bodies from the Institute of Legal Medicine of Granada and 352 from living donors. They have used new thermographical and weather measurement tools and they have applied traditional microbiological methods with a new approach. The aim of this work is to establish a microbiological indicator to determine the time of death. Therefore, scientists have tried an alternative method of approach to the estimated time of death in order to reduce the present margin of error in the application of other different methods and limit to the maximum the moment of death.
This new mothod is very interesting to forensic science. Without using algor mortis or forensic entomology scientists can now use an even more effective method to determine the time of death on any victim that is recorvered to forensic science.

3 comments:

Thomas said...

This article was very well done. Joe did a good job of explaining the detail of this new method, that will allow for more accurate time of death calculations, which was recently developed by scientists of the University of Granada. Another thing that I thought was well presented was the way he mentioned the application of this method to forensic science, and how it will reduce the margin of error in time of death predictions. The article thoroughly explains how this method uses microorganisms to come up with a very accurate time of death. Lastly, I liked the way the article was written, and organized. Some things that I might suggest to be improved, would be adding a timeline for the implementation of this process, and if it is realistic to have it easily used by investigators in local police offices. Overall this was a good review.

Sam Benner said...

Joe did a good job with this article. It was very detailed and explained the newly discovered method with depth. It was interesting to read that this method helps to find a more accurate time of death, thanks to scientists at the University of Granada. It was a very well organized article and brought new knowledge about microorganism usage. There is not much to frown upon for this article, but the method itself will improve and expand with time. Overall, this was a well-presented article.

Anonymous said...

I think Joe did a good job with this article. Three aspects of the review that i found were particularly well presented include a good topic of choice pertaining to the field of forensic science, a well written brief analysis of the article pinpointing its key importance's, and good explaining on the new method of estimating the time of death and a nice walkthrough of how the procedure works. Two thing that may have helped this review would be better sentence structures and an explanation on previous techniques and how they differ from this one. Overall, i though joe did a good job in summarizing the article and I learned how even today new and more efficient techniques are being discovered to help benefit forensic science.