Personally, I find this article pretty disturbing: Iowa City VA patients not told about bacteria problem. Basically, the story is, that the bacterium that causes Legionnaires disease (Legionella pneumophila) has been found in the water system at a VA hospital in Iowa. And the managers of the hospital say “But they said they’ve been able to control the …
A short blip of the full job posting from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They are inviting applications for four full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty positions, and one of the desired areas of expertise includes: (3) Microbiomes of the Natural and Built Environment. This area addresses …
Some new papers that may be of interest to people: FOAM (Functional Ontology Assignments for Metagenomes): a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) database with environmental focus. Statistical Methods for Functional Metagenomic Analysis Based on Next-Generation Sequencing Data PhD thesis from Pookhao, Naruekamol Profile Hidden Markov Models for the Detection of Viruses within Metagenomic Sequence Data Parallel-META 2.0: Enhanced …
Just got pointed to this by Sharon Strauss, the chair of the Evolution and Ecology department here at UC Davis: The Science of Science Communication II Sackler Colloquium. This is a collection of papers from a colloquium held in Septment 2013. Slides and videos of the talks are available online. The papers and links (copied from the …
Just a quick conference announcement here for “Human Connection: the Roles of Materials, Human Performance, and Research Translation in Health-Centered Buildings” sponsored by the US Green Building council to be held in Bethesda MD on November 10th. Information from the website below: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Health in Buildings Roundtable (HiBR), U.S. Green …
Well, the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meting ended one week ago. And it was a great meeting. I am writing up some reflections of the meeting which I will post in a few days. But for now I thought I would post a little note that I am experimenting with a new (for me) approach …
Just a quick post here. Some may have noticed that more of the posts here at microBEnet than say, a year ago, are not focused explicitly about “microbiology of the Built Environment” (MoBE). They are instead sometimes focused on microbiology, history of microbiology, architecture, methods in microbial ecology, bioinformatics tools, and more. There is a reason …
N. b. Should it appear presumptuous, I was publicly prompted to write this. I loathe to link to the original post by Locwin, but must for my response to make sense. A recent blog post (Sept 22, 2014; accessed Sept 24, 2014) by Ben Locwin addresses in the title and first line a study in Nature (Suez …
Well this is very interesting. The FDA has announced a competition: U.S. Food and Drug Administration | 2014 Food Safety Challenge. From their site Summary While the American food supply is among the safest in the world, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 1 in 6 Americans is sickened by foodborne illness …
scikit-bio is a library for building bioinformatics tools and workflows in Python. It’s already a core dependency of QIIME, is extensively used in An Introduction to Applied Bioinformatics, and was the subject of my talk at SciPy 2014 (video) this past July. One of our focuses with scikit-bio is to make its functionality very accessible …