These will almost certainly be of interest to the MoBE community. There is a new paper in mSystems “Geography and Location Are the Primary Drivers of Office Microbiome Composition” by John Chase, Jennifer Fouquier, Mahnaz Zare, Derek L. Sonderegger, Rob Knight, Scott T. Kelley, Jeffrey Siegel, J. Gregory Caporaso. I found out about the paper via …
Last night, the premiere of a PBS series on the built environment aired. It is a three part series that will cover “10 Homes that Changed America,” then the equivalent for parks and towns. Apparently, this stemmed from a similar series on buildings that aired several years ago. More on the series and what will …
Just a quick post on a new paper posted last week at PeerJ. As in the previous post, this is a PeerJ Preprint, meaning it is not peer-reviewed yet. Microbial diversity of extreme habitats in human homes Amy M. Savage​, Justin Hills, Katherine Driscoll, Daniel J Fergus, Amy M Grunden, Robert R Dunn PeerJ Preprints 4:e1874v1 …
Another interesting (and closed access) paper from Indoor Air… this time from Naegele and colleagues in France… “Microbiological consequences of indoor composting“. Indoor composting has become more and more popular in urban areas where traditional composting isn’t an option. Here’s a nice look at what that does to the microbial community of the location. Abstract …
2013-5-19MBPF Source: Sources of airborne microorganisms in the built environment | Microbiome | Full Text Really nice new review paper by Aaron Prissin and Linsey Marr. It covers research on sources of airborne microbes including Humans Pets Plants Plumbing HVACs Water damage Dust Outdoor air Really thorough with tons of references and discussion of the …
Designers Martin Krzywinski and Barbara Jeannie Hunnicutt provide a peek behind the scenes, and explain how they developed a data visualization based on bacterial genome information derived from dust. Source: The Evolution of a Scientific American Infographic: Secret Life in Household Dust – Scientific American Blog Network This is an absolutely fascinating look behind the …
A blog post from the Scottish Wildlife Trust by Ed Taylor discusses the importance of greenspace in Scotland’s suburban and urban areas. It’s part of a “50 for the Future” series that suggests 50 things that should occur in Scotland over the next 50 years to benefit both people and wildlife. As suburban areas are …
So our first attempt at entering the world of bacterial taxonomy and the description of a new species came out today with the thrilling title of “Porphyrobacter mercurialis sp. nov., isolated from a stadium seat and emended description of the genus Porphyrobacter“. The story leading to this paper took us into a lot of new …
Wow – this is really really cool: Hidden Life Forms: Investigating Microbial Diversity on Our Bodies and in Our Homes. The article is by Jennifer Cutraro and it goes through a series of course / learning activities regarding microbial diversity – of homes and of people. It has things like: a warm up activity a pre-activity …
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water” -Loren Eiseley- Aquatic ecosystems can be placed into two discrete categories, native and managed. Native aquatic ecosystems may be influenced by human activities, in fact we’d be hard-pressed to find one that isn’t, but there is no intention to the influence. Managed aquatic …