Survived by things up your nose (Image: JOTI/SPL)

TINY finger-like projections lining the nose continue to beat after death. Since the beating of these cilia slows at a predictable rate, forensic teams should be able to estimate time of death more accurately.

Pinpointing precisely when someone died can be a challenge for investigators. They can look at body temperature or decomposition rate, but these indicators can be confounded by temperature, or whether the person was involved in a struggle, say, shortly before death. The beating rate of cilia could provide an additional tool to help decide time of death, especially if it was within the previous 24 hours.

Nasal cilia are tiny projections that waft mucous, dust and bacteria out of the nose and into the throat. Biagio Solarino of the University of Bari in Italy and his colleagues suspected that cilia continue to beat after death. So they took a scraping of the inside of the nose from 100 cadavers to examine the cilia.

“Motility was observed as long as 20 hours after death,” says Solarino, who will present his results at the International Symposium on Advances in Legal Medicine in Frankfurt, Germany, this week. They hope to use the cilia to judge time of death since not only does the beating slow gradually but it also seems relatively immune to environmental factors.