Msnbc.com was looking into seafood safety regulations and the protocols for reopening Gulf fishing areas when we came across a little-known but fascinating aspect of the seafood safety enforcement: the panel of secret testers.

NOAA officials already had noted they planned to use a panel of 10 expert assessors to decide when to open closed fisheries. But when we asked for the names of those experts, NOAA and the FDA balked at giving us a list, saying they feared for the accuracy and the safety of the testers if they were identified.

Then we learned that there's an entire industry of seafood sniffers -- and a place that trains them. The University of Florida operates a Professional Seafood Sensory School, which includes a targeted Shrimp School, that has trained some 500 students in the past 12 years, according to Victor Garrido, who helps coordinate the program.

Students usually come from government, industry or from private labs that are now being required to bulk up their testers' certification. Demand for sniffers could spike in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, Garrdio said.

We're live blogging about a NOAA briefing today in Pascagoula, Miss., where we'll get a chance to watch some 40 new sniffing recruits show off their talents.

Click here to read the next post in the series: Let the briefing begin ...

When oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon well finally stops gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the decision about whether to reopen at least 81,000 square miles of waters to commercial fishing will rest with the trained noses and palates of a secret panel of nearly two dozen seafood sniffers.

They're the deciders, a group of experts -- highly skilled and exquisitely practiced in detecting unusual odors and tastes, including those of petroleum – that will largely determine the fate of the region's $659 million-a-year fishing industry.

Working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they will be charged with sniffing raw and cooked samples of 10 kinds of fish and shellfish, tasting a bit of each – and then deciding, yea or nay, whether an area can reopen.

"This is a major determination of the acceptability of the seafood coming out of the Gulf," said Steven Wilson, chief quality officer for NOAA's Seafood Inspection Program. "This is a major step."

Today you'll learn more about the program as msnbc.com live blogs a briefing at the NOAA lab in Pascagoula, Miss. Msnbc.com reporter Kari Huus will be on the scene, writing about a class of aspiring testers as they check a fresh load of seafood from the Gulf, and msnbc.com health reporter JoNel Aleccia will be filling in the facts and sharing interesting details about the testing program from our offices in Redmond, Wash.

When the oil-spewing Deepwater Horizon well is finally plugged or capped, which BP now hopes to accomplish by late this month, Wilson anticipates that he'll be running three "sensory crews" that will test up to 100 samples of seafood a day. For a specific geographical fishery to pass the first hurdle, five of seven testers on a panel must detect no trace of petroleum odor or flavor. If they detect any taint, that fishery remains closed. If the seafood passes, it is sent to a lab for chemical confirmation.

The new recruits are among some 40 state workers from the five Gulf Coast states that NOAA is teaching to be front-line testers. They will sniff fish on docks and in labs, determining whether the samples warrant further testing. If they clear the seafood, it will be sent to the secret experts, who are the final human arbiters.

That job is so politically charged that NOAA officials won't release the panelists' names. Officials say that the workers, including some who live in the Gulf Coast communities devastated by the spill, could face enormous pressure and even danger over their decisions about reopening the fishing areas.

"There are angry fishermen who are like, 'It's clean, let me in there,'" said Christine Patrick, a NOAA spokeswoman. "They're concerned not only for their objectivity, but for their safety."

The testers might have reason to be worried, said Capt. J.W. Berry, who runs fishing trips as a member of the Louisiana Charter Boat Association.

"If they don't open it back up, I can see them getting scrutinized," said Berry, 29, who also works as a New Orleans firefighter. "I can see them getting harassed and picked on. Not me, but I can see certain types of people doing it."

Click here to read the next post in this series: How we stumbled across the fish sniffers

This heat wave stinks. No really, it does: After the holiday weekend, New York’s Department of Sanitation called in back-up support to haul away smelly trash that had been roasting on the streets of Manhattan for three days. Now in their fourth day, the record-breaking triple-digit temperatures on the East Coast have prompted local officials to crank up efforts to keep their citizens safe – and to crank up the A/C.

Here are a few places to stay cool along the Eastern seaboard:

• Baltimore kids stuck in summer school got a break Wednesday: The public schools, only half of which have air conditioning, were closed. More time to take a swim! Baltimore’s pools have extended their hours.
• In Syracuse, N.Y., county beaches are offering free admission.
• In the D.C. area, libraries are keeping their doors open later; so are senior centers in the Pittsburgh area.

Local efforts aren’t just keeping folks cool. They’re saving lives, and in some cases, money:

• Philadelphia has launched a “heat-warning battle” that includes a hotline and officials who check in on the elderly, block by block.
• In Boston, a shelter took in about 200 homeless people, while outreach vans brought water throughout the day and night to those still on the streets.
• In the Portland, Maine area, as hardware stores ordered extra air conditioners, volunteers went door-to-door to check on residents with medical conditions.
• And in Burlington, Vt., if you use, you lose: Several large power consumers, like the University of Vermont, receive rebates if they limit their electrical use.

The heat wave hasn’t been a breeze for everyone, though:

• In New Jersey, dry conditions helped ignite a brush fire near the Garden State Parkway, causing an 11-mile traffic jam. To stay cool, officials advised the 24,000 people who lost power late Tuesday to spend at least a couple of hours every day in malls and movie theaters. Hmmm, that sounds different from the advice Mom and Dad gave back in the day.
• In Annapolis, Md., four U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen were treated for heat exhaustion after training. Elsewhere in the state, officials said they plan to investigate a rehab and nursing home in Baltimore after residents had to be moved from the center, which has been plagued with air conditioning problems.
• In Middletown, Conn., two high school assistant football coaches were arrested after a football player collapsed from the heat during a strength-and-conditioning session Tuesday night.

How are you beating the heat? Many msnbc.com readers are drowning their sorrows in pools, oceans, and gorges. If you’ve found other solutions, tell us here.

-By Elizabeth Chuck and Ryan McCartney, msnbc.com

LONDON -- An obscure BP-themed board game in which players aim to avoid rig disasters has become an unexpected hit at a British toy museum.

BP Offshore Oil Strike was released in the early 1970s and allows up to four players to explore for oil, build platforms and construct pipelines. The first player to earn $120,000,000 wins.

Its "hazard cards" include "Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick clean-up costs. Pay $1million."

BP announced Monday that it has spent $3.12 billion dealing with the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The game was recently donated to the House on the Hill Toy Museum in Stansted, Essex.

"The parallels between the game and the current crisis... are so spooky," museum owner Alan Goldsmith told Britain's Metro newspaper. "The picture on the front of the box is so reminiscent to the disaster with the stormy seas, the oil rig and an overall sense of doom.

"I was just knocked over by how relevant this game is, despite being made some 35 years ago, to BP’s troubles today."

Goldsmith said the game is worth about £75 ($115).

- By Jason Cumming, msnbc.com

A photographer taking pictures of a BP refinery in Texas was detained by a BP security official, local police and a man who said he was from the Department of Homeland Security, according to ProPublica, a non-profit news organization in the U.S.

The photographer, Lance Rosenfield, said he was confronted by the officials shortly after arriving in Texas City, Texas, to work on a story that is part of an ongoing collaboration between PBS and ProPublica.

Rosenfield was released after officials looked through the pictures he had taken and took down his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information, the photographer said. The information was turned over to the BP security guard who said this was standard procedure, ProPublica quoted Rosenfield as saying.

Rosenfield, a Texas-based freelance photographer, said he was followed by a BP employee after taking a picture on a public road near the refinery, and then cornered by two police cars at a gas station. The officials told Rosenfield they had the right to look at the pictures taken near the refinery and if he did not comply he would be "taken in," the photographer said according to ProPublica.

BP gave ProPublica the following statement after the incident:

"BP Security followed the industry practice that is required by federal law. The photographer was released with his photographs after those photos were viewed by a representative of the Joint Terrorism Task Force who determined that the photographer's actions did not pose a threat to public safety."

In response to BP, ProPublica's editor-in-chief Paul Steiger said:

"We certainly appreciate the need to secure the nation's refineries. But we're deeply troubled by BP's conduct here, especially when they knew we were working on deadline on critical stories about this very facility. And we see no reason why, if law enforcement needed to review the unpublished photographs, that should have included sharing them with a representative of a private company."

When msnbc.com contacted BP, spokeswoman Sheila Williams said there was nothing the firm wanted to add to its earlier comment.

ProPublica filed two recent reports about BP. One deals with the similartities between the 2005 explosion at the Texas City refinery and the blast at Deepwater Horizon, and another is about thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals that were release by the refinery earlier this year.

By Stephanie Himango, NBC News Producer

CAMP RIPLEY, Minnesota – Snipers in place, a convoy of Humvees stopped on the outskirts of a tiny village. U.S. soldiers dismounted their vehicles with M-4 rifles strapped across their chests and walked slowly under the hot sun toward a few Afghan men sitting under the awning of a small concrete building. Across the dusty road were two more buildings, with women milling around in front, dressed in colorful skirts and headscarves, selling bananas and fans.

The U.S. soldiers were looking for the village elder, a customary sign of respect in Afghanistan. They had come on intelligence that at least one insurgent was staying in the village.

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Appearing in a long white flowing robe, the village elder greeted the U.S. soldiers – all communication was done through an Afghan National Army soldier who acted as a translator. After some conversation, the Afghan soldier translated the elder’s words. "They are not from here," he said of the insurgents. "They are from outside."

The U.S. soldiers’ goal was to maintain an atmosphere of calm despite spurts of emotion and impassioned conversation by villagers who started to gather nearby. The village elder invited the group leader inside for tea, while allowing other soldiers to conduct a search of the home to secure it.

Within moments, gunfire erupted from the next room. An insurgent had been hiding there and opened fire on the U.S. soldiers as they entered, wounding one. The soldiers returned fire, shooting and killing the insurgent.

In reality, this was all an exercise, conducted not in an Afghanistan village but at Minnesota’s Camp Ripley. No one was shot. There was no enemy. The guns fired blanks.

From the elders, to the village women selling wares, to the men in town, to the insurgents, all were working to the same end: to prepare Iowa Army National Guard soldiers for deployment to Afghanistan.

The scene was an amalgamation of many urban operations training drills the soldiers went through recently.

Afterward, the whole group conducted an After Action Review. Members of the military served as Observer Controllers giving feedback from an operational standpoint and the villagers, played by Afghans who now live in the U.S., critiqued the soldiers on how they did in terms of cultural awareness.

"If they go into town, they have to ask for the elder first," said Muhammed, who played the role of the village elder. Muhammed left Afghanistan 28 years ago.

The intensive training sessions, which took place in June, utilized all 53,000 acres of Camp Ripley’s sprawling grounds. The Camp Ripley facility has a long history of hosting National Guard units from around the country because it is such a large space; these Iowa Army National Guard soldiers came here for training ahead of their deployment to Afghanistan later this summer.

The urban operations training was only part of the weeks-long nonstop regimen here.

In addition to the austere living conditions and lack of sleep that is meant to mirror the reality soldiers will likely face when they’re deployed, every aspect of the training was designed to prepare soldiers for what they'll encounter in Afghanistan. Included were repeated training sessions at live fire ranges, mortar ranges, M-2 50-caliber heavy machine gun ranges, medevac helicopter lifts to evacuate wounded soldiers, areas where soldiers encountered Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and Traffic Checkpoint lanes.

Photo by Stephanie Himango/NBC News

Iowa Army National Guard soldiers engage in a training exercise at Minnesota’s Camp Ripley.

The realism of the drills was striking. In the IED training, as soldiers in Humvees negotiated the winding roads and vegetation on the lookout for IEDs, they came upon a broken-down vehicle on the side of the road. Even though they cautiously approached the disabled truck and the Afghans surrounding it, it was still a halting moment when the modified vehicle-borne IED exploded – sending a plume of dust and talcum powder into the air, creating the intended chaos.

To underscore the extent to which this training is designed to prepare soldiers for what they may encounter, artists were employed to create realistic-looking wounds among the injured – going so far as to create bloodied limbs and amputations.

A woman playing the part of an injured Afghan wailed in pain as her arm lay on the ground and stretched her other hand toward a U.S. soldier. While trying to secure the area, assess the damage and manage the Afghan actors moving around in apparent shock, the unit also called in a medevac helicopter to do a mock evacuation of one of their wounded.

Again, after it was over, they conducted an After Action Review to assess what they did well and what they could do better. The intention of doing multiple and repeated iterations of the drills, with ever-changing nuances, is to best prepare the soldiers for deployment.

Soldiers in the Iowa Army National Guard first learned of their upcoming deployment to Afghanistan last fall. At that time, an estimated 3,500 members of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 34th Infantry Division were scheduled to deploy.

Now that number has been revised to about 2,800 from the Iowa Army National Guard, plus about 350 Nebraska Guard soldiers, and about 100 from other states who will be part of the late summer deployment.

A brigade of this size makes this the largest deployment of the Iowa Army National Guard since World War II.

A Taiwanese businessman says he has a 1,115-foot-long weapon for BP and the federal government to deploy in the Gulf spill. But some maritime analysts are skeptical of Nobu Su's conversion of a huge oil/bulk ore ship to duty as a skimmer worthy of Monstro:

“I don’t think the concept is that bad, but I don’t see how in this situation it’s going to be a significant player,” said Dennis Bryant, a former Coast Guard officer who worked on implementing regulations required by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 before retiring and starting a maritime consulting business in Gainesville, Fla.

“In a case like the Exxon Valdez spill, where you had a lot of oil on the surface in a confined area, a vessel like this could have gone in and sucked up a whole lot,” he said. “But in the Gulf, where the oil is pretty well dispersed over a vast area, I don’t see how it’s going to make a large dent.”

Read the msnbc.com report by Projects Team Editor Mike Brunker on the ship's conversion and experts' reaction.

And for a video view of the ship, check out this report from NBC News' Anne Thompson.

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A government ship sets off Thursday to tag and track whales, dolphins and 19 other species of marine mammals in Gulf waters. The aim is to see whether the BP spill is impacting individuals and larger populations.

Scientists hope to tag 21 sperm whales, for example, "to see if the spill will affect the size of their 'home range' and their movements within feeding areas," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says in a statement.

Buoys with listening devices will also be deployed for up to four months to record "the moans, clicks and whistles" of whales and dolphins. "These records will allow scientists to track changes in the occurrence of marine mammals as the amount of oil exposure changes throughout the summer and fall," NOAA said.

"By recording the sounds from all the marine mammals that live in the Gulf of Mexico, we can get a more complete picture of the health of this ecosystem," said researcher John Hildebrand. "By beginning our study soon after the spill began, we may see trends in the presence of animals in the affected area."

The study comes as a separate researcher reported spotting three whale sharks, the world's largest fish, swimming in oily waters.

"Our worst fears are realized. They are not avoiding the spill area," Eric Hoffmayer, a University of Southern Mississippi scientist, was quoted in the Mobile Press-Register as saying. "Those animals are going to succumb. Taking mouthfuls of oil is not good. It is not the toxicity that will kill them. It's that oil is going to be sticking to their gills and everything else."

Last week, Hoffmayer was the first to spot a group of 100 whale sharks -- one of the largest congregations ever seen in the Gulf. The species migrate north in late spring from waters near the Yucatan to feed off the mouth of the Mississippi River.

While it's not known how many whale sharks exist, they are on the World Conservation Union's "red list" of threatened species.

Two National Public Radio staffers say there's been a mystifying roadblock on their attempts to report on the health effects of the spill in Louisiana's southernmost parish. Bridget DeSimone reports that while she and Betty Ann Bowser found local officials and media contacts at the Unified Command Center Operations generally helpful, they were stymied in trying to report on one angle:

It has been virtually impossible to get any information about the federal mobile medical unit in the fishing town of Venice, La. The glorified double-wide trailer sits on a spit of newly graveled land known to some as the "BP compound." Ringed with barbed wire-topped chain link fencing, it's tightly restricted by police and private security guards.

And they say they're not the first to run into this roadblock -- NewsHour colleagues and reporters from Fox News also were denied access to the unit. Read the NPR report here. And The Huffington Post has a little more to say on the topic, too.