Murder Mystery in Space? Sounds Like the Plot Right Out of a Board Game

Amaze Lab

When someone commits a crime we have a pretty good system for determining wrongdoing and sentencing an individual based on the act and where it was committed. But what if someone commits a bloody crime in space?

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00:00When someone commits a crime, we have a pretty good system for determining wrongdoing and

00:07sentencing an individual based on the act and where it was committed.

00:11But what if someone commits a bloody crime in space?

00:14So far that hasn't really been an issue.

00:16But as private companies continue to take average joes up, it's only a matter of time

00:20before one of them does something against the law in outer space.

00:23And if one of those crimes is murder, especially murder involving blood spatter, forensic scientists

00:28are going to need a whole new data set to determine how things happened, if they happen

00:32in microgravity.

00:33And it turns out experts are already on that.

00:35Using a parabolic flight research plane that induces a period of microgravity via freefall,

00:40also known as the vomit comet, experts studied drops of blood and how they react during this

00:45period of weightlessness.

00:47Researchers looked specifically at how the blood droplets interacted with surfaces upon

00:51which they were projected, finding that they reacted much differently on impact.

00:55On Earth, droplets collapse and form a wave pattern, spreading as they form their final

00:59shape and come to rest, and possibly absorbed by a material.

01:03In microgravity, however, they don't spread in the same way.

01:06Instead, surface tension keeps them more balled up, with the resulting stain being much tighter

01:11in shape.

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