Steve Furlong wrote:
Powder color is the thing that's been driving me up a wall the past few days. People are panicking about the wrong dang thing.
I'm not at all sure that a large collection of anthrax spores would look like a powder. These things are far too small to see individually. A mass of them would look like a paste. Any visible granularity would either be because they had agglutinated into larger particles in some way, or because they had been mixed with a powder as some sort of vector.
I'm tempted to scatter baker's yeast in a public place and powdered sugar nearby, and observe which causes people to panic. All that's left is figuring out how to do this enough times for meaningful results, without getting arrested...
New emergency law in UK as of this week. Up to 7 years in jail for biowarfare hoaxes. In a world of cheap DNA sequencing, these well-known bacteria bear their ancestry with them like an audit trail. They are *American* anthrax. Why doesn't the FBI let some of those Arabs go without torturing them, and pick up some of the workers from their own biowar labs? Ken Brown