There are a bunch of stories out in relation to work from MIT on “Living Materials” See MIT News Engineers design ‘living materials’ Value Walk MIT Scientists Develop Living Materials Using 3-D Images Of Bacteria Gizmodo MIT’s Living E. Coli Materials Could Provide Self-Aware Surfaces The Register RISE of the LIVING CHAIR: Boffins recruit E coli to build futuristic …
(update, 3-25-14. Fixed the link to the article being described and added link to PDF of paper available from Research Gate) I posted an article in the past discussing the benefits of copper as an antimicrobial agent, but the authors had a huge conflict of interest. However, I still found the idea of using copper …
Posting a note from my [gleeful] chemistry colleagues Allen Goldstein and Pawel Misztal about the new instrument that is headed our way. BIMERC will soon receive an exceptionally unique and powerful Proton Transfer Reaction Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (PTR-ToF-MS 8000) for instantaneous detection of a full range gas-phase organics including microbial volatile organic compounds (MVOC). There …
At a recent meeting of the Sloan Foundation program on Microbiomes of the Built Environment I gave a talk about microBEnet and kind of begged people in the program to send me emails when they had new papers out so we could include them in our reference collection and could blog about them. And one …
Just saw the abstract of this paper: The effects of climbing vegetation on the local microclimate, thermal performance, and air infiltration of four building facade orientations that was published 3/19 in Building and Environment. Authors are Irina Susorova, Parham Azimi and Brent Stephens. I am intrigued from reading the abstract (I don’t have access to the whole paper). …
Jordan Peccia has posted the slides from his tutorial, Molecular methods for bioaerosol analysis on Slideshare. If you would like to get a quick overview of molecular-biology based methods, this is a painless, accessible way to do it. You are encouraged to post your comments and questions after you review the slideshow. We hope to …
Microbiology is on a roll, it’s been an amazing couple decades of discoveries that have transformed our understanding of the roles that microbes play in human health. And this knowledge has pushed its way into popular culture. Every couple of days I see another popular media article about the influence of microbes on something else; …
Grr. These types of stories really bug me: British technology set to banish germs in hospitals and homes | City & Business | Finance | Daily Express. It is in theory a news story. But it is pretty much an advertisement for this Odorox building sterilization system with no critical reporting. Here are some claims in …
Posting some details here on the upcoming AAAS Symposium on Microbiomes of the Built Environment. The meeting is coming up – on March 27, 2014 in Washington DC. And it will be webcast live. See here for details on the webcast. A more detailed agenda is here: Agenda from the AAAS Meeting Site
We got the great news that the Sloan Foundation has funded the proposal to continue the Berkeley Indoor Microbial Ecology Research Consortium. BIMERC is a collaboration of UC Berkeley scientists with a goal “to understand the microbial ecology of the build environment through interdisciplinary research that combines microbial biology, particle transport physics, chemistry, and architecture.” …