I stumbled across a dead body couple of posts over at Quantum Moxie on the thermodynamics of post-mortem cooling of a body: Mistakes were made . . . and the followup, Post-mortem body cooling in variable environments.

[T]he standard post-mortem body cooling method used to estimate time of death (TOD) does not take into account a varying environmental temperature (i.e. it assumes a constant ambient temperature when applying Newton’s Law of Cooling).

And since were on the subject of physics and dead bodies, Zapperz notes a brouhaha about a physics exam question involving a gunshot victim and bullet trajectories.