The Body Farm

From Forensics Mag:

In death investigations, timing is everything. It could mean the difference between determining a suicide, a homicide, or a natural death. Of course, the vicissitudes of biology and environment mean no two corpses are exactly alike—and the post-mortem interval continues to be a scientific riddle. But the famed “Body Farm” of the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville has been the place where direct experimentation on human beings attempts to piece out this biological mystery of death and decay. There the bodies of donors have been left out in the elements in tightly-controlled conditions, to determine how breakdown begins and ends. When it was founded in 1971, it was one-of-its-kind. Since then, it’s provided a template for several imitators in the American South—and across the globe.(Read more.)