Now for something lighter. The website Science Daily reported on a study at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, to look at mold in houses reported to be haunted. The news announcement reports, “By comparing these samples to samples from places with no reported hauntings, the researchers hope to identify factors unique to the haunted …
We have recently been awarded a new research program by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation to further develop out understanding of how bacterial, archaeal, viral and fungal communities interact on indoor surfaces. This research will be led by Jack Gilbert (University of Chicago), in collaboration with Chris Henry (UChicago), Brent Stephens (Illinois Institute of Technology), …
Just a quick announcement that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has approved another series of “Microbiology of the Built Environment Postdoctoral Fellowships”. See the 2014 call here. There will be three Fellowships in 2015, and another three in 2016. The actual request for proposals (RFP) will come out and be posted on microBEnet around May …
Just got sent this article (thanks Paula Olsiewski) “The Passive House in New York” which is an interesting article about the increasingly popular concept of passive houses. As the name suggests, passive houses maintain an appropriate ambient temperature without heating or cooling, mostly through airtights seals, a lot of insulation, and some sort of air exchange …
A new paper “Evolution of the Indoor Biome” is out and should be of interest to many who think about microbes in the built environment and related topics. The paper has quite an incredible collection of authors: NESCent Working Group on the Evolutionary Biology of the Built Environment, Laura J. Martinl, Rachel I. Adams, Ashley …
This is the second of three posts about the planetary protection workshop I attended at NASA Ames from March 24-26, 2015. The first is here (and here.) Forward contamination, in the context of planetary protection, refers to the transport of microbes from Earth to Mars. The title of the workshop, and many talk titles refer to “human …
Well, I have been digging around a lot into Nanopore sequencing recently. This started as preparation for a lecture I gave at the Bodega Applied Phylogenetics course a few weeks ago on “The Evolution of DNA sequencing.” In preparation for my talk I posted my slides from last years talk and asked people on Twitter …
There is a new paper out that may be of interest to many: “When Data Sharing Gets Close to 100%: What Human Paleogenetics Can Teach the Open Science Movement”. It discusses an analysis of paleogenetics and the open science / open data practices in the field. This seems like it could be of relevance to the …
Dear metagenome method developers, The first challenge of the Initiative for the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) begins right now! Over the last three months, we received valuable feedback from the community playing with our toy data sets. We incorporated many of your suggestions, thanks again! Today, we proudly release the official data sets …
reposted from jennomics.com http://www.nasa.gov/ames/events/ppw2015workshop/#.VRMLLJPF8mU I’m at a NASA Ames workshop this week. The goal is to have a discussion about planetary protection with respect to human spaceflight, in particular to Mars, mostly during a “sample and return” mission and a little bit about human habitation on Mars. I’m tweeting with #planetaryprotection. There’s also live streaming here: …