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Washington officials are revealing that air sensors on the National Mall detected a possible disease agent during the recent Iraq war demonstrations.

Health officials say the sensors showed signs of a low level presence of Tularemia bacterium, known as "Rabbit Fever." Tularemia can be treated with antibiotics and is not contagious.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has alerted state health officials in D-C, Maryland and Virginia. But officials say no one has reported symptoms of the disease, and subsequent air tests have come back negative.

The CDC also said the bacteria can be used as a weapon if made into an aerosol that could be inhaled.

"The bacteria that cause tularemia occur widely in nature and could be isolated and grown in quantity in a laboratory, although manufacturing an effective aerosol weapon would require considerable sophistication," the CDC said.

Officials say Tularemia is found naturally in the environment. Health officials are encouraging doctors to be on alert for any signs of the disease. Symptoms include sudden fever, chills, headaches, joint pain and pneumonia.

Area health officials were not notified for five days that sensors on the Mall had detected a potentially dangerous bacterium there last month because subsequent tests were not conclusively positive, a federal official said yesterday.

The Department of Homeland Security delayed in alerting the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the same reason, said Richard Besser, who directs the CDC's coordinating office for terrorism preparedness and emergency response. More than half a dozen sensors showed the presence of tularemia bacteria the morning after thousands of people gathered on the Mall for a book festival and antiwar rally, yet the CDC was not contacted for at least 72 hours.

Testing never identified all the definitive markers for which scientists were looking, and officials were wary of issuing a false alarm, Besser said. He called the entire incident "highly unusual," but he acknowledged that it would prompt the two agencies to review their protocol and the timeliness of their response "to make sure the system doesn't have any flaws in it."

"It really will cause us to look at the system and say, 'Should things have been different?' " Besser said in a phone interview.

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) has suggested that the answer is yes. In letters he sent Monday to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and CDC Director Julie Gerberding, he called the notification time frame "alarming" and asked for an accounting of the procedures triggered when the government's "BioWatch network" senses a biological agent.

His questions focused on what each agency knew and when it knew it, as well as which local and state officials were called and when. "Why weren't these officials notified immediately following the detection?" Davis wrote.

D.C. Health Director Gregg A. Pane, who learned of the situation in a conference call Friday morning, said he would have liked to have been involved sooner. Hours after being alerted by the CDC, he and his counterparts across the Washington region put out an announcement for the public.

"I wish they'd bring us in earlier," he said yesterday, with the "retrospective scope" clearly in place. "There's got to be a level of trust and communication" among the entities and layers of government, he said.

As of yesterday, local and federal health officials said they had confirmed no cases of tularemia from the Mall gathering and, through medical surveillance, had not found any spikes in possible symptoms. Although the germ that causes tularemia is highly infectious, the disease itself is not passed from person to person and can be easily treated with antibiotics. Left untreated, it can be fatal.

Besser said that if the initial evaluation had revealed true positives, the laboratory would have immediately contacted Homeland Security, which would have immediately brought CDC and local health agencies into the discussion.

Instead, as late as Thursday, CDC officials expected final testing to disprove the presence of the bacteria. "So we didn't really think there was a need to alert [area] public health officials," he said.

In his letter, Davis requested specifics about the bacteria levels ultimately detected and the government's plan to inform the public of risk. "How do you monitor the thousands of people who visited the affected areas?" he asked.

A Homeland Security spokeswoman did not return calls to comment on the issues Davis raised.

Source: The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/
AR2005100401544_pf.html

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Astronauts onboard the International Space Station have been observing electric blue "noctilucent" clouds from Earth-orbit.

They hover on the edge of space. Thin, wispy clouds, glowing electric blue. Some scientists think they're seeded by space dust. Others suspect they're a telltale sign of global warming.

They're called noctilucent or "night-shining" clouds (NLCs for short). And whatever causes them, they're lovely.

"In January 2003 we enjoyed outstanding views of these clouds above the southern hemisphere," said space station astronaut Don Pettit during a NASA TV broadcast in January 2003."We routinely see them when we're flying over Australia and the tip of South America."

Sky watchers on Earth have seen them, too, glowing in the night sky after sunset, although the view from Earth-orbit is better. Pettit estimated the height of the noctilucent clouds he saw at 80 to 100 km ... "literally on the fringes of space."

"Noctilucent clouds are a relatively new phenomenon," says Gary Thomas, a professor at the University of Colorado who studies NLCs. "They were first seen in 1885" about two years after the powerful eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which hurled plumes of ash as high as 80 km into Earth's atmosphere.

Ash from the volcano caused such splendid sunsets that evening sky watching became a popular worldwide pastime. One sky watcher in particular, a Briton named T. W. Backhouse, noticed something odd. He stayed outside after the sun had set and, on some nights, saw wispy filaments glowing electric blue against the black sky. Noctilucent clouds. Scientists of the day figured the clouds were some curious manifestation of volcanic ash.

Eventually the ash settled and the vivid sunsets of Krakatoa faded. Yet the noctilucent clouds remained. "It's puzzling," says Thomas. "Noctilucent clouds have not only persisted, but also spread." A century ago the clouds were confined to latitudes above 50o; you had to go to places like Scandinavia, Russia and Britain to see them. In recent years they have been sighted as far south as Utah and Colorado.

Astronaut Don Pettit is a long-time noctilucent cloud-watcher. As a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory between 1984 and 1996, he studied noctilucent clouds seeded by high-flying sounding rockets. "Seeing these kinds of clouds [from space] ... is certainly a joy for us on the ISS," he said on NASA TV.

"Although NLCs look like they're in space," continues Thomas, "they're really inside Earth's atmosphere, in a layer called the mesosphere ranging from 50 to 85 km high." The mesosphere is not only very cold (-125 C), but also very dry - "one hundred million times dryer than air from the Sahara desert." Nevertheless, NLCs are made of water. The clouds consist of tiny ice crystals about the size of particles in cigarette smoke. Sunlight scattered by these crystals gives the clouds their characteristic blue colour.

How ice crystals form in the arid mesosphere is the essential mystery of noctilucent clouds.

Ice crystals in clouds need two things to grow: water molecules and something for those molecules to stick to - dust, for example. Water gathering on dust to form droplets or ice crystals is a process called nucleation. It happens all the time in ordinary clouds.

Ordinary clouds, which are relatively close to Earth, get their dust from sources like desert wind storms. It's hard to waft wind-blown dust all the way up to the mesosphere, however. "Krakatoa may have seeded the mesosphere with dust in 1883, but that doesn't explain the clouds we see now," notes Thomas. "Perhaps," he speculates, "the source is space itself." Every day Earth sweeps up tons of meteoroids - tiny bits of debris from comets and asteroids. Most are just the right size to seed noctilucent clouds.

The source of water vapour is less controversial. "Upwelling winds in the summertime carry water vapour from the moist lower atmosphere toward the mesosphere," says Thomas. This is why NLCs appear during summer, not winter.

One reason for the recent spread of noctilucent clouds might be global warming. "Extreme cold is required to form ice in a dry environment like the mesosphere," says Thomas. Ironically, global warming helps. While greenhouse gases warm Earth's surface, they actually lower temperatures in the high atmosphere. Thomas notes that noctilucent clouds were first spotted during the Industrial Revolution - a time of rising greenhouse gas production.

Are NLCs a thermometer for climate change? An unusual sign of meteoroids? Or both? "So much about these clouds is speculative," says Thomas.

A NASA spacecraft scheduled for launch in 2006 should provide some answers. The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere satellite, or AIM for short, will orbit Earth at an altitude of 550 km. Although it's a small satellite, says Thomas, there are many sensors on board. AIM will take wide angle photos of NLCs, measure their temperatures and chemical abundances, monitor dusty aerosols, and count meteoroids raining down on Earth. "For the first time we'll be able to monitor all the crucial factors at once."

Meanwhile, all we can do is wait... and watch. There's never been a better time to see noctilucent clouds. "During the summer months, look west perhaps 30 minutes to an hour after sunset when the Sun has dipped 6o to 16o below the horizon," advises Thomas. If you see luminous blue-white tendrils spreading across the sky, you've probably spotted an NLC. Observing sites north of 40o latitude are favoured.

One more thing: don't forget your camera. According to astronaut Don Pettit, "you can never have too many pictures of noctilucent clouds."

Source: First Science
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/strange.asp 

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The human instinct to observe nature has always been mixed with a tendency to embroider upon it. So it is that, over the ages, societies have lived alongside not only real animals, but a shadow bestiary of fantastic ones - mermaids, griffins, unicorns and the like. None loomed larger than the giant squid, the kraken, a great, malevolent devil of the deep. "One of these Sea-Monsters," Olaus Magnus wrote in 1555, "will drown easily many great ships."
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Science, of course, is in the business of shattering myths with facts, which it did again last week when Japanese scientists reported that they hooked a giant squid - a relatively small one estimated at 26 feet long - some 3,000 feet down and photographed it before it tore off a tentacle to escape. It was the first peek humanity has ever had of such animals in their native habitat. Almost inevitably, the creature seemed far less terrifying than its ancient image.

Scientists celebrated the find not as an end, but as the beginning of a new chapter in understanding the shy creature. "There're always more questions, more parts to the mystery than we'll ever be able to solve," said Clyde F. E. Roper, a squid expert at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.

Monster lovers take heart. Scientists argue that so much of the planet remains unexplored that new surprises are sure to show up; if not legendary beasts like the Loch Ness monster or the dinosaur-like reptile said to inhabit Lake Champlain, then animals that in their own way may be even stranger.

A forthcoming book by the noted naturalist Richard Ellis, "Singing Whales, Flying Squid and Swimming Cucumbers" (Lyon Press, 2006), reinforces that notion by cataloguing recent discoveries of previously unknown whales, dolphins and other creatures, some of which are quite bizarre.

"The sea being so deep and so large, I'm sure other mysteries lurk out there, unseen and unsolved," said Mr. Ellis, also the author of "Monsters of the Sea" (Knopf, 1994). Explorers, he said, recently stumbled on an odd squid more than 20 feet long with fins like elephant ears and very skinny arms and tentacles, all of which can bend at right angles, like human elbows. "We know nothing about it," Mr. Ellis said. "But we've seen it."

Historically, many unknown creatures have come to light purely by accident. In 1938, for example, a fisherman pulled up an odd, ancient-looking fish with stubby, limblike fins. It turned out to be a coelacanth, a beast thought to have gone extinct 70 million years ago. Since then, other examples of the species have occasionally been hauled out of the sea.

Land, too, occasionally gives up a secret. About 1900, acting on tips from the local population, Sir Harry H. Johnston, an English explorer, hunted through the forests of Zaire (then the Belgian Congo) and found a giraffe-like animal known as the okapi. It was hailed as a living fossil.

In 1982, a group of animal enthusiasts founded the International Society of Cryptozoology (literally, the study of hidden creatures) and adopted the okapi as its symbol. Today, self-described cryptozoologists range from amateur unicorn hunters to distinguished scientists.

At the Web site for the group, www.internationalsocietyofcryptozoology.org, there is a list of 15 classes of unresolved claims about unusual beasts, including big cats, giant crocodiles, huge snakes, large octopuses, mammoths, biped primates like the yeti in the Himalayas and long-necked creatures resembling the gigantic dinosaurs called sauropods.

Lake Champlain, on the border between Vermont and New York, is notorious as the alleged home of Champ, a beast said to be similar to a plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile with a small head, long neck and four paddle-shaped flippers.

There, as at Loch Ness and elsewhere, myth busters and believers do constant battle. "Not only is there not a single piece of convincing evidence for Champ's existence, but there are many reasons against it," Joe Nickel, a researcher who investigates claims of paranormal phenomena, argued in Skeptical Inquirer, a monthly magazine that rebuts what it considers to be scientific hokum.

Then there are the blobs. For more than a century, scientists and laymen imagined that the mysterious gooey masses - some as large as a school bus - that wash ashore on beaches around the world came from great creatures with tentacles long enough to sink cruise ships. Warnings were issued. Perhaps, cryptozoologists speculated, the blobs were the remains of recently deceased living fossils more fearsome than the dinosaurs, or perhaps an entirely new sea creature unknown to science.

Then last year, a team of biologists based at the University of South Florida applied DNA analysis to the mystery. It turned out they were nothing more than old whale blubber. "To our disappointment," the scientists wrote, "we have not found any evidence that any of the blobs are the remains of gigantic octopods, or sea monsters of unknown species."

Psychologists say raw nature is simply a blank slate for the expression of our subconscious fears and insecurities, a Rorschach test that reveals more about the viewer than the viewed.

But the giant squid is real, growing up to lengths of at least 60 feet, with eyes the size of dinner plates and a tangle of tentacles lined with long rows of sucker pads. Scientists, their appetites whetted by the first observations of the creature in the wild, are now gearing up to discover its remaining secrets.

"Wouldn't it be fabulous to see a giant squid capturing its prey?" asked Dr. Roper of the Smithsonian. "Or a battle between a sperm whale and a giant? Or mating? Can you imagine that?"

"We've cracked the ice on this," he said, "but there's a lot more to do."

Source: NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/weekinreview/02broa.html

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Televisions crews, psychics and paranormal investigators have been flocking to a store in Gloucester, England, that seems to have video proof of the existence of ghosts.

After finding the store a mess one morning staff at Poundstretcher on Eastgate Street examined CCTV footage of the night before.

What shocked them was the sight of a ghostly figure of a Victorian woman that appears to stand in the shadow for hours before becoming angry and pushing a whole pallet of goods to the ground.

Deputy manager Sue Cooper, 46, who lives in Brockworth, said: "The assistant manager and department manager left the shop immaculate when they left one night, but the next morning I walked in with a member of staff and it looked a mess.

"I went through the CCTV and you can see an entity standing behind the pallet.

"By 2.30am she had pushed it over and was kneeling or sitting down on some cases."

The apparition is of a woman, dressed in a high neck black dress, with hair tied back and very white hands.

A bit of research shows that the shop stands on the site of an old Theatre - The Theatre Royal, later known as The Palace. It was first opened in 1791 and closed in 1922.

There have been previous stories of a haunting in the building. One such tale tells of a young woman who, it's said, took her own life, and was found hanging from a piece of theatre equipment beneath the stage.

It's the ghost of this poor woman who staff claim to have captured on camera.

Cooper, told us it's not the first time she's come into close contact with the apparition. She said, "You can often feel her presence, sometimes you can feel an icy cold. You can feel a gagging or choking, especially downstairs in the cellar."

Source: WUSA TV 9
http://www.wusatv9.com/news/news%5Farticle.aspx%3Fstoryid=43427