Murder investigations have become more popular over the past hundred million years or so. Even very old unsolved murder cases sometimes arouse public interest. Here is a newly reported very old case: “Death by ammonite: fatal ingestion of an ammonoid shell by an Early Jurassic bony fish,” Samuel L. A. Cooper and Erin E. Maxwell, […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Double Jeopardy — … Jane Ridley assesses a tough legal problem in an Insider.com article with an extremely long headline: “Identical college twins were accused of cheating in an exam by signaling. They won $1.5 million […]
Perfect murders are more common in actual life than in crime fiction—and also more highly approved, suggests this forensic study: “How to Commit a Perfect Murder,” Mark Cooney, International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 295-309. The author, at the University of Georgia, explains: Curiously, social science has ignored the problem […]
If you (yup, you) use a fake weapon to brutally beat a stranger, and then slit his throat, and then shoot him in the face, and then you assault a little baby, will your heart and blood pump like mad — even if you know that it’s all a trick and the man will suffer […]
