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The study of death is in fact a study of life. Lifestyle, genetics, birth, health issues, attitude, and diet all are researched after death. These all play a vital part in the world of forensics. Biologists, pathologists, entomologists, anthropologists, forensic profilers, chemists, and many others help piece together the puzzle of a person's life. Regardless of the manner in which one meets their end, unless the body is severely mutilated, there is a very distinct series of occurrences that take place in a dead human body. Once the energy-producing system ceases to function, due to lack of oxygen or nutrients, death occurs, and the eyes turn cloudy and sink in to be level instead of rounded, which happens very soon after brain death.
After death occurs certain metabolic activities continue and provide clues to time, manner and mechanism of death. Livor mortis is the settling of the blood, causing the places in which it rests to discolor to a bluish-red. The face loses the natural radiance of life. More than just the loss of color, experts say there is a certain look to a dead face that is unmistakable even to one who has never before seen a corpse. Muscle tissue stiffens everywhere in the body, occurring within a few hours and lasting up to five days. Actin and myosin produced by the muscles, substances that can't be processed by a dead body, form together into a gel which hardens. This stiffening is called rigor mortis. The body begins to cool to the temperature of the surroundings. This is known as algor mortis, and the length of time it takes to happen varies from minutes to a few hours. As with any cooling object, the body cools from the outside in.
One of our earliest records of how insects helped solve a crime comes from in China, in the year 1235, in a small village. The victim had been murdered, and the murder weapon was a rice sickle normally used to cut the rice. The Mayor got all of the men of the village to put their apparently-clean sickles on the ground in front of him. Flies landed on one, and only one, of the sickles. They were attracted by the protein from the blood of the murdered man. Even though the sickle had been wiped clean, a thin layer of protein remained. The mother fly needed that protein to provide nutrition for her babies. The owner of that sickle confessed to the murder.
Today, this field of using insects to help solve crimes is called Forensic Entomology. It's not a very full field - in 1998 there were only 20 forensic entomologists in the USA, and only one of them was full-time. The rest work at universities or museums, and are called in to help out with crimes. The field of forensic entomology really began as a science in 1971. At that time, Bill Bass was an anthropologist who was mainly interested in studying thousand-year-old bones of American Indians. But from time to time, various police authorities would ask him about a body found in the woods, because they wanted to know when it had died. Bill didn't really know, and he soon discovered that there was no real research in this field anyhow, so he set out to build up a database by himself.
Find some interesting web sites about research being done by The Body Farm at the University of Tennessee, maggots and their role in forensics, and anthropology.
Students in Biology II at Mandarin High learn about the correlation between bone size and height, they grow maggots, and research behavior of rolypolies to better understand how much our environment affects our life. They research cases involving September 11 and cases involving bone identification for missing persons and mass disasters. They also evaluate teeth to begin to understand how your teeth can be used for identification.