A nice article in Forbes talking about microbes in general and about Jessica Green’s recent work on visualizations of microbial communities in the built environment (see her TED talk here).
At microBEnet we’ve had a long standing interest in citizen science in microbiology (and are finally doing some ourselves). If you’re interested in the idea of citizen science, check out this webinar on how to recruit citizens scientists.
The University of Chicago has just opened a massive new hospital on the university campus. Jack Gilbert is PI on a study of the evolution of the hospital microbiome funded by the Sloan Foundation. The evolution of the microbiomes in a set of hospital rooms is being studied continuously beginning before the hospital accepted the …
Nice study by Norm Pace’s group looking at microbes present in the air in New York City subway systems. They didn’t find any organisms of public health concern, and showed that the ventilation and mixing of outside air appear to work well. This work does provide an important baseline of data for evaluating the effects …
Worth checking out this workshop summary entitled “The Science and Applications of Microbial Genomics” A couple of chapters in there from Sloan-funded projects in the microbiology of the built environment. $79 for the book but the PDF is free.
Time to push out a bunch of draft blog posts that have been piling up. First up is a new study finding that a large percentage of dental bib clips harbored bacteria even after disinfection. What I liked about this study was that they made a good effort to explain that they didn’t find any …
Not much to add to this story other than to say that this is one of those examples where germophobia seems certainly justified: Dentist’s office a ‘perfect storm’ for HIV, hepatitis exposure – CNN.com.
Lee Ann Kahlor and her team at the University of Texas Interviewed nearly fourscore U.S. researchers in academia, government, defense and private industry to try to understand researchers’ perceptions of the challenges and opportunities for science communication to a wider audience (lay and decision makers). Here is what Dr. Kahlor said about the work: “Two …
Jessica Green gave another great TED talk recently, this time talking about engineering buildings to influence microbial communities. Check it out. The software that they’re developing in collaboration with Autodesk looks really cool.
Last week Jenna Lang, Russell Neches, and myself headed over to the Sacramento King’s basketball arena to collect samples before the game as part of project MERCCURI (a.k.a Microbes in Spaaaaace!). Our goals were: 1)To get culture samples, of which one representative will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) for the “microbial playoffs”. 2)To …