from the dead-men-don't-talk-but-they-can-still-tell-stories dept.
A team of scientists have found that changes in gene activity in human tissue after death could be used to determine the time of death:
Computational biologist Roderic Guigó didn't start out as a death detective. Guigó, of the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, is also part of the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.1262110] [DX]) pilot, a large consortium of geneticists and molecular biologists that has been measuring gene activity in tissues from hundreds of people, living and dead. The goal is to determine how the body makes different cells do different things, given that they all carry the same DNA instructions. It also seeks to determine how slight variations in DNA from person to person change what cells do. Other researchers have already shown that some genes stay active up to 4 days after death. Guigó wanted to find out how gene activity changes as the time to preservation is extended.
He and his colleagues looked at 9000 samples of 36 tissues, "an impressive data set," Tagkopoulos says. Each sample included data on the time between the death of the donor and the preservation of the sample. Each tissue has a distinct pattern of increases and decreases in gene activity over time, and these changes can be used to backtrack to the time of death [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02772-x] [DX], the team reports today in Nature Communications.
Also at BBC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @03:06PM (2 children)
Or do we just faint for a very long time? And then wake up in a new suit?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday February 14 2018, @05:25PM (1 child)
That seems to be the general idea with reincarnation.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday February 14 2018, @10:07PM
Also wish fulfillment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @08:28PM
Anyone want to wager this'll be used in court prior to the conclusion of studies covering a wide range of people and environments and establishing the uncertainty of the technique with decent confidence?
Anyone want to guess how many jurors understand the idea of uncertainty in measurements?
Anyone feel like explaining to a jury why, despite you being able to see the length is in the middle of the mm marks, you can't write .5mm?