Well, this could end up being interesting:Homeland Security To Test Biosensors In MBTA Stations Overnight « CBS Boston. At 1 AM Wednesday morning, at the Porter, Davis, and Harvard Square T stations on the Red Line of the MBTA researchers from the Department of Homeland Security will purposefully release killed Bacillus subtilis bacteria into the air. This will be done to test some new biosensors that are designed (apparently) to detect a biological attack.
I note – this type of activity shows one reason why studies of the microbiology of the indoor environment are critical. If you want to detect something anomalous (e.g., a biological attack) you need to know what nomalous is (i.e., what normal is). We desperately need more information about where one would expect to find microbes of different kinds. We need, shall we say, a field guide to the microbes, in order to then tell what is anomalous. See http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-obsession-with-field-guide-for.html for more detailed discussions on why I think there needs to be an effort for a Field Guide to the Microbes.
