Is it possible to build a dehydating machine that would completely dehydrate a human body, thereby reducing it to a pile of minerals, like on an old epsiode of the original Star Trek? Wouldn’t that be a great idea for a serial killer?
Isn’t that what happens when somebody is cremated?
maybe it could be done by freeze-drying, but you’d have to grind up the body first I think; You still wouldn’t be left with a pile of basic minerals; you’d just have human jerky mince.
the egyptian mummies have a pretty minimal moisture count.
Damn you, Qadgop, I was headed there myself. 
Are you kidding, these guys will send bowser back to you whole! You will have to grind him up, of course.
The barriers to doing it to people are primarily social and legal.
Tris
“Cabbage: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.” ~ Ambrose Bierce ~
I reckon (good cite eh?) if you were to analyse a sample of Egyptian mummy, you’d find that it had a certain amount of residual ‘locked away’ water content; I’d bet that it’s at least 5%.
Natural materials are pretty much impossible to completely dessicate by ordinary air-drying (or even whatever artificial processes the Egyptians used); possibly not an entirely helpful comparison, but most softwood that you buy in DIY stores has a water content of something like 14 - 20% (by weight); A figure of about 17% is normal for air-dried timber, 14% for kiln-dried.
They have shipping as well. :eek:
These corpses have been completely dehydrated, with all the fat removed as well. The water and fat has been replaced with a polymer in a process called plastination :
The result is a dry, odor free corpse that does not decay, and retains its life-like shape and suppleness (depending on the polymer used).
Note that just because a corpse is dehydrated, it does not fall apart into constituent minerals. You would have to subject it to a process (such as cremation) that would break all the molecular bonds that comprise the tissues of the body…
Holey crap, I took a fish taxidermy course from Angler’s Taxidermy… but it was in Calgary. They freeze-dried a couple of my (former) pet fish for me too. I got mine done for free, but they said normally they charge $50/month in the freezer. It should only take a few days to get done, but they’ve usually got their freezer so full of road kill at varying moisture levels that it can take months…
On another note I saw a TLC program while ago where a guy researched how mummification was done, found an old man who’d donated his body, and he made him into a mummy, starting by dehydrating the body. They only showed his hands, feet, and other small shots, but he looked like a giant bleached raisin. About getting ALL the moisture out, well… could be done but you’d need some pretty fantastic technology to push a button on your belt and have the person instantly turn back into a normal person :).
Am I the only one who thought of Dune, here?
On a related note, do bodies subjected to intense fires shrink significantly? My father told me (20 years ago) about seeing the after effects of a helicopter crash in Aden and how the bodies had shrunk. I’d tend to believe him because he seemed pensive/emotional (they were his mates), but he has been known to exaggerate.