Are the microbes in our homes alive, or are they dead? If they are alive, what are they doing? We plan to answer these questions during my MoBE Postdoctoral Fellowship, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Bacteria in house dust can originate from places such as the outdoors or from the bodies of humans. …
The Sloan Foundation has just announced their 2013 Microbiology of the Built Environment Postdoctoral Fellows. The awards, along with the titles of the projects are below. Congrats all! Aaron J. Prussin at Virginia Tech, co-advisors Linsey Marr and Kyle Bibby (Pittsburg) “Bacterial and viral microbiomes of daycare centers” Anne. A. Madden at University of Colorado, …
Sept. 18, 2013. Magill House – I’m in a B&B that was once a cure cottage in the Adirondack town of Saranac Lake, New York, where for more than 70 years tuberculosis patients came from the big city hoping that the cold mountain air would cure their disease. Half the houses had TB patients near …
For those wanting to catch up on some of the cool research that was presented this week at the 32nd Annual Conference of the American Association for Aerosol Research in Portland, I’ve pulled together some of the tweets that were posted during the meeting into a Storify! This year only 4 people were tweeting at …
Completely fascinated by these pictures of abandoned farm houses: Photographer Niki Feijen's eerie images of the abandoned farm houses | Mail Online. . And that got me wondering – what happens to the microbial ecology of a building once it is abandoned. I am not familiar with any studies of this and a few quick …
Just thought I would write up a quick post on a session at the Infectious Disease Week meeting in San Francisco that I was part of. The session was entitled “Media, Social Media, and Open Access: Communicating the Science of Infectious Disease” and it featured three talks: Tara Smith, PhD: Using Social Media to Affect Change …
In the United States, floods are the most common natural disaster (NFIP, 2013). Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency of precipitation extremes in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to increased flood risks (Min et al., 2011; Pall et al., 2011). Studies suggest both general flooding and extreme flood events will become increasingly frequent as …
In the last 24 hours I saw articles with the following three headlines: My dishwasher is trying to kill me: Extreme conditions suit pathogenic fungus. Compost Harbors Legionnaire’s Disease Bacteria Bacteria, Mold Found In Vacuum Dust You’re not safe anywhere! And people wonder why microbes get such a bad rap. Yes, of course some microbes …