If this type of dark matter existed, people would be dying of unexplained wounds

Re:If this type of dark matter existed, people would be dyin... by ben_w on Sunday July 21, 2019 @02:01PM (#20492672)

If you were a doctor or a forensics pathologist, and saw a hole in a body, how much evidence would you need to convince yourself that this was caused by something occurring inside and work its way outwards, rather defaulting to thinking its was caused by something outside that went in?

This isn’t a rhetorical question by the way, I genuinely do not know if the mere absence of a bullet at the deep end would be sufficient, or if entrance and exit wounds look so radically different from each other that no one could possibly mistake one for the other.

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Re:If this type of dark matter existed, people would be dyin... by pmichaud on Sunday July 21, 2019 @03:17PM (#20493117)

I know nothing, wild speculation follows.

I'm pretty sure it's "easy" to tell an entrance from an exit, especially with a hollow point bullet (basically like an explosion out of the exit). Even without the explosion thing, I'd be shocked to learn that there are not tell-tale signs because an object pushing inward at a high speed will leave the tissue at certain angles, like maybe the soft tissue caved a little inward around the entrance, the bones broken in the direction the bullet was traveling, that sort of thing.

But all those thing depend on the object being ballistic, like a fast moving object flying through the body. With a "laser beam" sort of wound, I'm not sure any of that would apply.

I assume that looking at a wound caused by a laser would be pretty baffling -- a roughly cylindrical, cauterized void with no apparent directionality. Even if the cause wasn't clear, I think it would look weird enough for a professional to say "Wait, something is super weird here."

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Re:If this type of dark matter existed, people would be dyin... by arethuza on Sunday July 21, 2019 @04:10PM (#20493370)

I read an autobiography of a forensics pathologist recently and he spent a lot of time obsessing about the shape of wounds (to the point of upsetting his family by stabbing their Sunday roasts so he could inspect the resulting wounds).

[The book is "Unnatural Causes" by Dr Richard Shepherd - strongly recommended even if it is just a wee bit gruesome in places.]

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Re:If this type of dark matter existed, people would be dyin... by zaarn on Monday July 22, 2019 @02:37AM (#20495769)

Considering that the wound would be heated to 10^7K, it'll likely create a very unique type of hole in the body.

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