Cadavers aid forensic fire study

Q: The fire spread across the man's bed and began consuming his nightclothes, then his body. Several people were close enough to help, but no one lifted a hand. Why the callous indifference?

A: It was actually calculated forensic research by a team of fire and death investigators, led by specialist Elayne Pope. Their mission: To determine exactly how the human body burns in a range of different circumstances, whether in house or car fires, from arson or murders where attempts are made to destroy the evidence, says Linda Geddes in "New Scientist" magazine.

The "victims" in these cases actually died a while ago, having donated their bodies to medical science.

The million-dollar question is often whether a fire death was accidental or deliberate, and this is where Pope and her team come in. To date they have made use of about 30 whole corpses and various additional body parts. (In the past, pig corpses were primarily utilized.) Pope's team has showed that, in the case of foul play where someone is shot or stabbed, the wound tends to open up during the fire and leave telltale burned-out regions.

The team also looked into a number of common fire-death myths, such as that of the exploding skull. Here they systematically burned 40 human heads before concluding that the brain may indeed boil, but there's no skull explosion.

Yet it may appear so once heat weakens it and falling debris crushes it. One of Pope's hopes for the future is for fire investigation to become more evidence based, as old textbook dogmas and myths are finally put to rest.

Q: It's not often that an invention or innovation has the effect of rescuing a single typewriter key from virtual oblivion, causing it to be pushed again and again. What is this key keyboard key?

A: The @ symbol, of course, which e-mail originator Ray Tomlinson in 1971 decided to use to link the user's name with the host network, "reviving this rather esoteric symbol and saving it from the brink of linguistic extinction," says Jack Challoner in "1001 Inventions that Changed the World."

Unaware of the global significance of the 200 lines of code making up the e-mail program, Tomlinson allegedly neglected to note what he wrote in the first e-mail ever sent. Later, he said it was probably something banal like "QWERTYUIOP" or "testing 1 2 3 4."

Q: Your modest sloop "Puddleduck" is in harbor one calm evening as you entertain a lady friend on board.