The headline above is from an article that someone sent us a couple of months ago that I just got around to checking out. It refers to a paper entitled “Detection of the Urban Release of a Bacillus anthracis Simulant by Air Sampling” published in Biosecurity and Bioterrism which is a journal that I bet …
Alex Pasternack at Vice.com’s Motherboard channel has some very interesting thoughts on domes. Giant, massive, city-bestriding domes, starting with the Great Stink Dome of Hangzhou, which was erected to contain vapors emanating from the site of a former insecticide factory. Pasternack’s article discusses some of the fascinating history related to the idea of dropping domes …
When we talk about animals in the built environment, we tend to mostly think about our companion animals such as dogs and cats. Of course insects and rodents also live alongside us. And many other animals live in built environments, including farms, zoos and aquariums. I study the microbes associated with cheetahs. In captivity cheetahs …
See here for Part 1 and here for Part 2 both posted in 2013. 27 April 2014. Leiden, the Netherlands Holland in April is orange and green. Following last year’s abdication by the Queen, yesterday was the first King’s Day in decades. The normally stoic Dutch draped themselves in brilliant orange, painted temporary flag tattoos …
I wasn’t able to make it to the Indoor Air meeting this year but I followed the action on Twitter. Here’s a Storify of the tweets using the #microbenet hashtag which was primarily used at the Sloan-funded microbiology of the built environment session. [View the story “Indoor Air 2014 #microbenet hashtag” on Storify]
Paper of potential interest to the microBEnet crowd: Phylogenetics and the human microbiome. It is a preprint in ArXiv by Erick Matsen. It focuses on the human microbiome but discusses the history of methods for phylogenetic analysis of microbial communities and it is quite good. Thanks to Erick for posting this to arXiv so that people …
While not exactly the microbiology of the built environment, studies of the human microbiome are the next closest thing and and understanding of both will be critical to creating healthier living environments. The American Gut project is the largest, crowdfunded/citizen science human microbiome effort, with over 3,000 participants so far (including myself). In addition to …
Gareth Griffith’s Slate article (2012) on endangered microbes told a story that had honestly never occurred to me. Sure, there are endangered species all over the world, and we are all too aware of organizations like the IUCN that classify and aim to preserve such creatures. But none of the organisms on IUCN’s Red List are microbes. …
Quick post here about an upcoming architect conference in Atlanta, GA hosted by the American Institute of Architects (AIA)… May 14-16th 2015. Here’s a bit of information from the organizer (they noted that they’d like to do more with connecting microbiome research and design): Submit a proposal of your own. Let this be your big …
Recently Brent Stephens from the Built Environment Research Group asked me what the most popular posts on microBEnet have been to date. I was intrigued, so decided to do some digging in Google Analytics and share the results. One thing worth noting is that the top 10 blog posts were scattered among the top 40 …