Well, kudos I suppose to the headline writer for this one:
Your faeces, my furry friend, are blowin’ in the wind – health – 12 August 2011 – New Scientist.
The article is about recent work by Noah Fierer and colleagues on bacteria in outdoor air in cities. Not exactly microbiology of the built environment but worth noting since, of course, air in buildings has to come from somewhere. Their study, which was published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, and which, alas, I do not have access to, focused on cataloguing bacteria in air samples from cities. They report that the bacteria in samples from winter time resemble those found in dog feces. Not sure if this is more that just a peripheral correlation at this time, but, well, kind of gross.
