Researchers at the Japan Science and Technology Agency found in this 2012 study that microbes like Geobacter sulfurreducens and Thiobacillus denitrificans can form small electric grids. These species cooperatively create electric currents through conductive minerals in soil, and can probably do so over a (relatively to microbes) large distance. These microbes and others like them are …
I’m working on a manuscript describing the different and particular challenges scientists in various disciplines face when incorporating citizen science into their research. So, I thought I would go looking for other articles about it, and found one with the promising title A new dawn for citizen science by Jonathan Silvertown. I’m holed up in …
In Dirty Dog: Do Pets Track Bacteria in Your Home? on the Popular Science blog, science journalist Brooke Borel describes her recent experience contributing to the citizen science experiment called The Wild Life of Our Homes run by Rob Dunn and Holly Menninger at North Carolina State University. Here she presents a beautiful graphic depicting how the samples that …
Great article from Brooke Borel writing for NOVA Online, “Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem–The Future of Hospitals?”. This covers some of the background of microbiology in hospitals, discusses work by both the BioBE Center and microBEnet… and of course the Hospital Microbiome Project as well as the NICU study from Jill Banfield’s lab. The article …
Quick post here. This seems like a potentially useful tools for labs to keep track of their culture collections. We definitely need something like this in my lab. LIIS: A web-based system for culture collections and sample annotation | Forster | Journal of Open Research Software.
Animal shelters provide an essential and beneficial social service, caring for an estimated 9 million pets each year in the United States. Many animals entering a shelter are highly stressed and lack the benefits of standard veterinary care, including vaccinations. Moreover animal shelters are an intensive housing situation that amplifies the transmission of infectious diseases …
This past Saturday, my wife picked ‘Frozen’ for movie night (no, we don’t have kids). In the movie, one of the main characters was born with the power to freeze her surroundings, which she struggles to control. By the time, ‘Let It Go’ was playing, I couldn’t help but wonder how the repeated freezing of …
Not sure how I feel about this one so I’m going to just throw it out there for discussion. It’s a hand sanitizer built into a hospital door, on the theory that since compliance is apparently problem in hospitals they should make it part of a motion that people are doing anyway (e.g. opening doors). …
Looks like there will be a great symposium on the Microbiology of the Built Environment this year. The symposium is organized by Filipa Godoy-Vitorino and Sarah Preheim. Speakers include several Sloan-funded labs (including Maria Dominguez-Bello, James Meadow, and Mark Hernandez) and it looks to cover a wide range of cool topics. Check out the video below:
Yesterday was to have been the day that our collection of 48 microbes, collected from built environments around the country, were to blast off into space and try growing in microgravity. This would be followed by swabbing of the space station performed by the astronauts. We plan to analyze these swabs using bacterial, archaeal, and …