Case of the Cooling Corpse In a murder investigation, a corpse was found by a detective at...

Case of the Cooling Corpse In a murder investigation, a corpse was found by a detective at exactly 8:00 PM. Being alert, he measures the temperature of the body and finds it to be 70°F. Two hours later the detective again measures the temperature of the corpse and finds it to be 60°F. (See Fig. 11.)

(a) If the room temperature is 50°F, and the detective assumes that the body temperature of the person before death was 98.6°F, at what time did the murder occur?

(b) The commonly assumed 98.6°F was based on an 1861 study in Germany that reported average normal body temperature as 37°C, with only two significant figures. Conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit gave an unreliable third digit, which has been questioned recently by medical researchers. For example, the result of a 1992 study was that average normal body temperature is more like 98.2°F.4 By how much does your answer to part (a) change if you use an average normal body temperature of 98.2°F?

Figure 11 Temperature of the cooling corpse in Problem.