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. But what if someone
00:12commits a bloody crime in space? So far that hasn't really been an issue. But as private
00:16companies continue to take average Joes up, it's only a matter of time before one of them does
00:21something against the law in outer space. And if one of those crimes is murder, especially murder
00:25involving blood spatter, forensic scientists are going to need a whole new data set to determine
00:30how things happened, if they happen in microgravity. And 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. Researchers looked specifically at how the blood droplets interacted
00:49with surfaces upon which they were projected, finding that they reacted much differently on
00:54impact. On Earth, droplets collapse and form a wave pattern, spreading as they form their
00:59final shape and come to rest, and possibly absorbed by a material. In microgravity, however,
01:04they don't spread in the same way. Instead, surface tension keeps them more balled up,
01:08with the resulting stain being much tighter in shape.
Comments