OK this looks like it will be really really interesting. Laurie Garrett sent me a link to this announcment about a meeting of the Empiricist League in New York: What are the 15,000 microscopic lifeforms that live on the subway? How disgusting are the contaminants in the Gowanus Canal? Can we use technology to stop …
Just got this job announcement by email: Hello, Please see the attached solicitation from Prof. Markus Covert regarding an open search for a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. We have recently launched a broad area search, open to faculty at the Assistant and Untenured Associate Professor level. Details and application …
I recently came across this detailed review “Metanalysis: Cleaning Hospital Room Surfaces to Prevent Health Care—Associated Infections” from the Annals of Internal Medicine. I think this is a fascinating topic because hospitals have to walk such a fine line with regards to microbes. On the one hand they want to avoid the probably counter-productive “kill …
I’m enjoying making maps of participants for kittybiome, a new participatory research project on the microbiome of cats. It was very easy to make this map using Google Maps. (And using Google Maps is particularly appropriate for the project because we have a celebrity cat named NDA, who lives with inventor of Google Maps participating in the project.) Here …
I have just discovered a nice microbiology themed podcast from the Society for General Microbiology. The podcast is linked to the “Microbe Post” blog and is called “Microbe Talk Extra”. Here is the most recent one on antimicrobials in water and the environment.
There is an interesting paper out a few days ago in PeerJ: MetaBAT, an efficient tool for accurately reconstructing single genomes from complex microbial communities. By Dongwan D. Kang, Jeff Froula, Rob Egan, Zhong Wang​. The key to what they do in the paper is summarized in Figure 1: The legend is below: There are three preprocessing steps before MetaBAT is …
According to a recent BBC news article, NASA is doing a Mars simulation project to see if six live human beings can survive being isolated in a dome together. From a MoBE perspective, it would be cool to study this system. It’s completely closed to outside microbes – the people living in this dome have to …