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 …
Jessica Green gave another great TED talk recently, this time talking about engineering buildings to influence microbial communities. Check it out. The software that they’re developing in collaboration with Autodesk looks really cool.
Last week Jenna Lang, Russell Neches, and myself headed over to the Sacramento King’s basketball arena to collect samples before the game as part of project MERCCURI (a.k.a Microbes in Spaaaaace!). Our goals were: 1)To get culture samples, of which one representative will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) for the “microbial playoffs”. 2)To …
Growing microbes in space sounds cool. Collecting microbes from sporting events is also cool (“excuse me, could I see that basketball after the game?”). Having fans collect samples with a chance that some of them will fly to the space station is a great way to engage people. Put them all together and you get …
(cross-posted from our static page on the project which will be updated as we move forward) Project MERCCURI is a collaboration of microBEnet with the Science Cheerleaders, Nanoracks, NASA, and SciStarter.com. There are three components to the project: 1) Collecting microbial swab samples from the International Space Station (ISS) and examining the microbial communities therein …
(posting this e-mail from USGBC) New Opportunities at USGBC:Thought Leadership and Research on Building Materials Understanding, communicating and analyzing building materials is a critical frontier for the green building industry. Google has recently provided a generous grant to USGBC to, in part, advance thought leadership and applied research in this area. As part of this project, USGBC …
One of our goals at microBEnet is to increase communication and collaboration between people working in the disparate fields that make up the “microbiology of the built environment”. Most of what we’ve posted about in the past relates to general information and events… but we’d also like to host more technical information that would help …
Seems like Legionella has been in the news a lot recently, with more and more outbreaks occurring (see recent posts here, here, here, and here). One of the largest outbreaks was in the VA hospital in Pittsburgh which got a lot of press because it occurred over a entire year and there have been numerous …
Next in our “People Behind the Science” video series we have an interview with Greg Caporaso from Northern Arizona University. Here he’s talking about his new Sloan-funded project on “Office Surface Microbiomes Across Climates”. Transcript: