Determining whether a death is murder or natural often comes down to forensics. In New York City, a medical examiner and his assistant redefined how to do it. Author Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize ...

In the early days of the culture war, science stood on one side and religion on the other. In 1925, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial hung on whether a Tennessee high-school instructor had violated ...

As a neurologist who specializes in critical care, I believe we need a clearer, more consistent legal definition of death. The Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), the legal standard for death ...

Laboratories that once focused on easing the final moments of life are now probing whether those moments are as final as medicine has long assumed. A wave of experiments on brains, organs, and ...

Researchers say there are long-standing flaws in the "science of death." Helen Jones has been searching for answers since her son died in 2009 while in custody at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility ...

Editor's Note: WBIR is reporting this week on the evolution of the University of Tennessee's Body Farm. This is the first installment. It all started because Dr. Bill Bass needed a place to keep the ...

Establishing a precise time of death (the postmortem interval, or PMI) upon discovery of a corpse is notoriously challenging, however easy fictional medical examiners might make it seem. Some forensic ...

Every week I write my next essay on a Saturday, send it to friends for comments, revise it on a Sunday, and submit it on a Monday. The post comes online on Wednesday. This week, the pattern was the ...

In the final episode of the FX series Dying for Sex, a hospice nurse with an oddly comforting sense of enthusiasm explains to a patient what to expect as she dies. “Death is not a mystery. It is not a ...

Brain death, also known as death by neurologic critera isn't just damage or a coma. It's irreversible. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...