This is really fascinating: Source: Team discover how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft Hat tip to Elisabeth Bik for posting about this on Twitter So cool: microbes actually feed on the cleaning products. Also cool: undergraduates as authors. Team discover how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft https://t.co/ox4kMawHko — Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) June …
Sometimes when a paper has many authors and drags on for years the resulting manuscript end up with a bit of a stitched together feel. And in this world of post-peer-review-by-socia-media it’s easy to hear about the flaws after the fact. Our recently published “A microbial survey of the International Space Station (ISS)” had some …
Just a quick post here to say that Dr. Jenna Lang, formally of the Eisen lab at UC Davis, will be on Science Friday tomorrow, 12/8/17 talking about our work examining the microbiome of the International Space Station. She expects to be on at around 12:40pm PST. The publication is here, and we’ve compiled …
Determining if life exists or ever existed beyond Earth is one of the most interesting scientific questions. Reports on numerous habitable planets have increased the speculations about potential extra-terrestrial life. However, these theoretically life-supporting planets are far beyond human’s reach – except Mars. In order to explore if there ever was life on Mars, the …
At the recent NAS MOBE meeting there was some discussion of some potential ethical concerns associated with one of the projects discussed (work of Eric Alm where he was collecting samples from urban water systems and trying to infer information about communities and residents). OK #MOBE17 and others out there – I am getting …
Microbes in space have been of interest to the folks at various space agencies for as long as we’ve been sending people into space. Rampant mold growth on the Russian Space Station Mir was probably one of the reasons for the decision to “deorbit” the station (a fancy way of describing crashing into the ocean). …
Just a quick post here. There is a new CNN story that may be of interest. An antibiotic-resistant superbug will launch from the same pad where the first manned mission to the moon lifted off to be studied on the International Space Station. Source: Why NASA is sending a superbug to the space station – …
Just a quick post here that all the information (including slides and videos) from a really interesting CASIS sponsored workshop are online. The topic relates to the most extreme built environment to date… the International Space Station. The workshop was called “Exploring the Microbiome/Immunome and Disease on the International Space Station” and took place back …
Just a mini post here. Got pointed to this press release of possible interest on a collaboration to study microbes on the space station and on other spacecrafts using single cell approaches: Source: NASA, Bigelow Laboratory Study Microbes on Spacecrafts – Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences
Windows, desks and employees are being wired up in a quest to create healthy, evidence-based environments. Interesting article by Emily Anthes in Nature: The office experiment: Can science build the perfect workspace? : Nature News & Comment It focuses on a collaboration between the Mayo Clinic and a design firm – Delos to create something called the …