Today our Project MERCCURI team gave a presentation at the National Science Teacher Association (NSTA) meeting in San Antonio. We talked mostly about the project, but also about ways that teachers could incorporate microbiology of the built environment in their classrooms. There’s a lot of interest in taking the kinds of work being done in …
A nice article in Forbes talking about microbes in general and about Jessica Green’s recent work on visualizations of microbial communities in the built environment (see her TED talk here).
At microBEnet we’ve had a long standing interest in citizen science in microbiology (and are finally doing some ourselves). If you’re interested in the idea of citizen science, check out this webinar on how to recruit citizens scientists.
The University of Chicago has just opened a massive new hospital on the university campus. Jack Gilbert is PI on a study of the evolution of the hospital microbiome funded by the Sloan Foundation. The evolution of the microbiomes in a set of hospital rooms is being studied continuously beginning before the hospital accepted the …
Nice study by Norm Pace’s group looking at microbes present in the air in New York City subway systems. They didn’t find any organisms of public health concern, and showed that the ventilation and mixing of outside air appear to work well. This work does provide an important baseline of data for evaluating the effects …
Worth checking out this workshop summary entitled “The Science and Applications of Microbial Genomics” A couple of chapters in there from Sloan-funded projects in the microbiology of the built environment. $79 for the book but the PDF is free.
Time to push out a bunch of draft blog posts that have been piling up. First up is a new study finding that a large percentage of dental bib clips harbored bacteria even after disinfection. What I liked about this study was that they made a good effort to explain that they didn’t find any …
Not much to add to this story other than to say that this is one of those examples where germophobia seems certainly justified: Dentist’s office a ‘perfect storm’ for HIV, hepatitis exposure – CNN.com.