Oct22HPT

When Mason alum Miriam Van Scott was working as a freelance writer in the mid-1990s, she was researching an article about the afterlife and realized what she needed was a compendium of all things related to the hell—so she wrote one.

A 1992 Mason Gazette story about the hatching of the very first Komodo dragons born in captivity outside of Indonesia.

The 15 students in the special topics class Facial Reconstruction started the semester with a generic plastic skull. Week by week, they sculpted different parts of their own faces, creating a portrait of themselves in clay and learning the forensic skills needed to put a face on a skull.

A collaboration between the Honey Bee Initiative and Mason's new Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory could yield critical advances in forensic science.

It’s the stuff of nightmares and horror movies: Tiny estuarine mud crabs become infected with an invasive parasite that takes over their bodies and brains. But it isn’t fiction, and Mason’s team of researchers is learning more about these invaders and how they impact the ecology of our region.

Robinson Professor Laurie O. Robinson has been selected by the American Society of Criminology as the recipient of the 2021 Herbert Bloch Award, which recognizes “outstanding service contributions to the American Society of Criminology and to the professional interests of criminology.”

What's it like to interview a mass murderer? Professor Mary Ellen O'Toole, a former FBI profiler, fills us in on that and Mason's new Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory, which will be one of only eight in the U.S. to use donor remains for forensic research.

The opening of George Mason University’s new Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory in the Spring 2021 semester establishes Mason as a leader in forensic anthropology and investigations and a valuable community partner with law enforcement.

More than 140 students are enrolled in the online anthropology class that “looks at the cultures where zombies and related folklore about the undead come from, and examines zombies from an ethnohistorical, medical anthropology, and anthropology of religion perspectives,” according to the syllabus.

As a consequence of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, rates of domestic abuse have increased. Improved procedures are needed to increase effectiveness of detecting bruises for people of color.