Today, Tilly and I went to the University of Bedfordshire in Luton to do a home-ed science day. It was brilliant! We’ve been once before – last year – but they did a different thing this year. This year we did some work on forensic science. Most forensic science experiments involve crime scene situations. So today, we did some work on that sort of thing. We went through a quick slideshow on the main points for our type of forensic science and then got going.
For the first activity, we looked at something which had a really complicated name that I have forgotten. Anyway, to be basic, there was a large horse meat scandal in 2013. This was when some companies and shops said that, for instance, their beefburgers had beef in them, but then if you looked further, it might actually have horse meat in it! Also, once or twice, there was a large scandal of pork. This was even worse because some people, particularly Muslims, due to their religion, don’t eat pork, so it can upset many people if they find that the thing that they just ate which they thought was beef was actually pork. So, we did a little forensic ‘food’ science test.
The staff had made everything a bit easier and more condensed for us than if we had been proper professional scientists. Basically, they got four small test tubes, labelled them ‘Chicken’, ‘Pork’, ‘Beef’, and ‘Horse’. The horse meat contents had been dyed pink, the chicken yellow, the pork purple, and the beef brown. Then they gave us a bowl full of special scientific gel stuff with little holes in it that they called ‘wells’. We also had three test tubes marked ‘Unknown’. We had to use a pipet to squeeze the contents of each ‘Unknown’ into each well. And whatever colour the dye showed up was whatever it resembled. So when our ‘Unknown’s went pink and yellow, brown, and purple, we knew that the first had horse and chicken in it, the second had beef, and the third had pork in it.
The next experiment we did was after lunch-break (for pudding we got lemon iced buns with lemon curd in the middle and the sultanas! Sorry, don’t think that was the highlight of my day…). We had to put on detective outfits (a large, full-body, white coat, shoe cover-ups, surgery masks, hairnets, and gloves, so as not to mess up the evidence with our own finger-prints, breath, footprints, hair samples, etc.) and we were sent into the replica of a woman’s home. The woman was called Marsha Withering. She was one of the four suspects (the other three being John Lock, Misha Ramen, and Bob Bailey) who was suspected to have stolen Jim Higgins’ rabbit, Flopsy. Tied to the hutch that Flopsy had been stolen from was a note saying ‘Served you right!’ and on the back was some Blu-Tak that had been stuck on to tack it to the hutch. Caught on the Blu-Tak was human hair… but was it Withering’s, Lock’s, Ramen’s, or Bailey’s? We identified the hair and found that it was Withering’s. Then we went round her replica-home and looked around, trying to find pens (so we could sample the ink and see if it was the same that was on the note). Also some hair had been reported in the bathrooms of all the suspects. We took samples of it and, once back at the lab, found that Lock’s and Ramen’s hair was cat, Bailey’s was dogs, and then, of course, Withering had rabbit hair in her bathroom!
At the end we discovered that it was indeed Withering. It was super super super fun. I’d love to go again next year!