In any murder investigation, one of the most crucial questions is when the victim died. Accurately pinning down the time of death helps forensic teams to track down the whereabouts of their suspects—and whether they had an alibi.
Despite the value of this information, it is currently not possible to estimate time of death in a reliable way after about 36-72 hours. But now a new test for calculating the exact time of death after as many as ten days has been developed. However, the method, which works by tracking the degradation of protein in muscles, has only been tested in pigs so far.
In forensic investigations, the time since death is known as the post-mortem interval. Forensic pathologists can use the physical and chemical transformations that occur in the body after the death in order to estimate it.
