Linda Geddes, the author of the article ‘Body burners: The forensics of fire’, is an award winning journalist. She is a regular contributor to The New Scientist, a UK based scientific magazine that has been published since 1987. The 2009 article details the methods used to conduct research on how a human body burns. The article’s intended audience is those who have an interest in forensic science or accident and crime scene investigations. As this type of research has not previously been published, it is also of interest to readers of The New Scientist. The article explains how corpses donated for medical research are used to conduct the research and how the results can be used to establish whether a fire death was accidental or deliberate. It gives the audience an understanding of how the human body burns in different situations. For example, when the dermal layer (the thick layer of connective tissue) shrinks and splits, it allows the fat to leak out. This burning fat enables the body to remain alight for several hours if there is sufficient material surrounding the fat to act as a wick. Elayne Pope and her team have created and tested a number of different scenarios, in which a body or body part is set alight to see what happens at each stage over a period of time. The research is evidence-based, …show more content…
For example, many textbooks had stated that an intact burning skull explodes when the brain boils. The group conducted experiments on 40 human heads to show that this was not always the case. This is an important finding, because these results could change the outcome of investigations. Other areas of research discussed included how the body changes position as it burns and how environmental conditions affect the way a body burns. The research conducted by Elayne’s group is the first of its kind anywhere in the