#TakeASample for National Citizen Science Day

I always looks forward to spending a chunk of my Friday listening to Science Friday. This segment is too good not to share… Science Club is back! Ariel Zych and Charles Bergquist, the awesome Science Club hosts, are celebrating National Citizen Science Day (April 16) with a new Science Club they are calling #TakeASample. This is awesome challenge …

Tilikum to Shed Light on Superbug Crisis?

You have all heard of Tilikum the killer whale. He’s known for killing 3 of his trainers and is featured in the documentary Blackfish. Regardless of where you stand in all of the controversy, Tilikum has been making the news once again due to an untreatable bacterial infection in his lungs. Here is the statement from SeaWorld: …

Making tables in LaTeX

I’m working on a manuscript where we analyze OTU co-occurrence patterns using network analyses as well as the traditional approaches (ordination, alpha diversity, etc.). This means that we have to include some equations in our methods and so for the first time, I am using Authorea and LaTeX. I am getting used to working with the …

Artist creates solid block of Beijing smog

As Beijing experiences its first “Red Alert” smog emergency, an aptly-timed bit of quirky performance art is making the round on Chinese social media and the English-language press today. A artist from Shenzhen who calls himself “Brother Nut” spent 100 days walking around Beijing with an industrial vacuum cleaner. He then collected dust into a …

A cloud of cloud things for detecting clouds

For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …

Antibiotic resistance genes in “black gold”

Sometimes efforts to be environmentally friendly can give rise to microbial challenges. This was nicely described by Katie Dahlhausen in her recent post about water quality about green buildings. Other examples include observations that Legionella pneumophila can be contracted from shower heads and the use of low flow shower heads and lower water temperatures may increase its transmission. Likewise, wastewater (e.g., Environmental and …

mSystems – Yet Another Microbiome Journal?

Yet Another Microbiome Journal? Jack A Gilbert Earlier this year I was invited by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) to be the Founding Editor in Chief of a new journal that they insisted would add to the cadre of existing publications supported by the ASM. As a constant editor I was interested, but also …

Air Quality on Airplanes

Happy 4th of July! Given how many people in the US are travelling this long weekend, this article about air quality on airplanes caught my eye. And, while you are reading this post, may I suggest the following song: B.o.B – Airplanes ft. Hayley Williams of Paramore ? In this short article called Air Quality on …