Life After Death: Bruno Frohlich

For the past 15 years, Frohlich's office has been the hub of the Smithsonian Institution's noninvasive study of just about anything nonliving. Just as medical CT scanners enable physicians to detect abnormalities inside patients' bodies, the technology lets scientists peer inside objects while keeping them intact. "In the past, the only way to fully examine something was to cut it open," he says.

 Frohlich's work as a physical anthropologist normally involves digging up bones. But since he started using the 3-D imager, he hasn't been able to stop. Smithsonian colleagues keep bringing him more and more items to scan, from dinosaur fossils to Mongolian desert mummies, space suits, amber-encased insects, and dozens of rare and historical musical instruments, including Stradivarius violins, violas, and cellos—more than 16,000 objects in all. A scan of one mummy-like object that curators thought might contain a sacred Egyptian kitten revealed it was hollow. "Anything you can put through the opening, we've been scanning," he says.
 Because of his unconventional talents, Frohlich straddles two worlds: He's mastered both the pure science of anthropology and the applied science of forensics. "Bruno's one of the best forensic anthropologists in the world," says Fredrik Hiebert, National Geographic Society's archaeology fellow. "He has this uncanny ability to look at the dust in the ground at a burial site and tell you what happened there."continue