There will be a session on “The Microbiome” at the AHCJ Association of Health Care Journalists annual meeting in Santa Clara, CA that may be of interest. Session Participants: Jonathan Eisen, Ph.D., professor, School of Medicine and College of Biological Sciences, University of California Susan Lynch, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine, University of California, San …
There is a new paper out in Frontiers in Microbiology by fungal geneticist Joan Bennett that is fascinating: Frontiers | Silver linings: a personal memoir about Hurricane Katrina and fungal volatile. Here is how it starts: In August 2005 I was about to start a sabbatical leave during which I planned to work on the annotation …
There is an article about the NY Subway Microbiome study by Bethany Brookshire that is worth checking out: Making a microbe subway map | Student Science. It discusses how high school students helped in the subway microbiome study that came out recently (see the post by Chris Mason about this here: The long road from Data to …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Mat Kearney – Breathe In, Breathe Out This paper came out last month, and I thought it would be nice to briefly mention it here, even though many other papers have looked at the concentrations of airborne bacteria and viruses as well. In this study, done by Aaron Prussin …
Counter Culture Labs is a company that stemmed from an MIT iGEM team that made synthetic cheese. Their goal is to make vegan cheese that tastes just like the real thing with the single important difference being it is not derived from a cow, but rather a lab bench. Synthetic food is starting to trend. …
One of my favorite blogs, Hackaday, recently covered a brilliantly detailed build of a mushroom cultivation control system by Kyle Gabriel. Kyle is a microbiology graduate student at Georgia State University studying the interactions of bacteria and pathogenic fungi for his research, and cultivates edible fungi for fun. The gadget monitors temperature and humidity in a sealed room under positive …
There are many possible ways in which climate change could impact human health. The U. S. Global Change Research Program has issued a new draft report on this topic and is soliciting public comments about this report (see USGCRP Climate for more information). The report is The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Kraftwerk – Radioactivity – Stop Sellafield concert 1992 Cockroaches are often portrayed as the only organism that can survive a nuclear disaster. Indeed, Discovery’s Mythbusters team found that about 10 percent of a group of cockroaches could survive 30 days of exposure to 10,000 radon units of cobalt 60, …
As people get more and more interested in the microbiology and microbiomes of the built environment, a critical additional step is to connnect this work to analyses of chemical compounds in the built environment. Studies of chemicals in the built environment have of course been going on for a long time (e.g., in studies of indoor …
Just a quick post here. A few weeks ago I took part in a session at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas on “The Era of The Microbiome“. The session ended up being basically a discussion between myself and Carl Zimmer that was moderated by Bernat Ollie. Bernat did a great job of getting questions …