Just a quick follow-up post here. Back in May we posted about a Wired article where they describe the interesting detective story of identifying a type of fungus that thrives on ethanol and grows extensively on and near distilleries. Being America, this was soon followed by lawsuits against the distilleries as described in a New …
Hmm … Not sure what to think of this. The Percolator (which is labelled as a free market environmentalism blog) has a mini story on possible dangers of banning reusable plastic bags: http://percolatorblog.org/2012/08/21/the-health-costs-of-plastic-grocery-bag-bans/ They embed a Youtube video with an interview they did with Jonathan Klick into their post … I am embedding it here too. …
Well, I wonder if this will get Marriott Corporation more involved in microbial studies in the indoor environment: Legionnaires’ disease outbreak kills 2 at Chicago hotel – CNN.com. Seems that there has been Legionella lurking around somewhere in the JW Marriott hotel in Chicago. The outbreak has led the hotel to drain all major standing water …
Here’s a case where just the title of an article is awesome: “Pyrosequencing-Derived Bacterial, Archaeal, and Fungal Diversity of Spacecraft Hardware Destined for Mars”. Sadly it’s not open access but the abstract is worth a read at a minimum. The authors conducted environmental surveys in cleanrooms and of equipment destined for Mars. Basically they found that …
Crossposting from “The Tree of Life”: How to find an Open Access journal for submitting your paper(s) … Got asked a question on Twitter that seems worthwhile to post here @phylogenomics any suggestions for appropriate open access journal for a geomicrobio/clay mineral – Cr reduction/ kinetics paper? – Paul Glasser (@glasserp) August 21, 2012 Well, @glasserp …
Well, this could end up being interesting:Homeland Security To Test Biosensors In MBTA Stations Overnight « CBS Boston. At 1 AM Wednesday morning, at the Porter, Davis, and Harvard Square T stations on the Red Line of the MBTA researchers from the Department of Homeland Security will purposefully release killed Bacillus subtilis bacteria into the air. This …
The publication of a paper “Tracking a Hospital Outbreak of Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae with Whole-Genome Sequencing” has drawn a lot of attention, presumably in large part because it occurred at an NIH facility. [http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/148/148ra116.full.html, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3004129] I work on the microBEnet project as a “building scientist” to help achieve the Sloan Foundation’s programs goals of …
More talks of interest from the AAAR meeting coming up in a couple of months. Previous posts about this meeting can be found here, here, and here. Phylogenetic-based Fungal Population Comparisons of Dust Collected from Water-damaged and Nonwater-Damaged Homes KAREN DANNEMILLER, Jordan Peccia, Yale University Abstract Number: 327 Working Group: The Indoor Microbiome In the 5MB.2 …
Just a quick post here. There is a detailed blog post of interest from Caitlin Knight of Anthrophysis discussing a recent PLoS One paper on bacteria in office spaces: Unseen Coworkers: Office Space Bacteria. We have written about this paper a bit here before: The hidden diversity of offices — what microbes are lurking there? …
“Indoors” appeared as a session title for the first time at the annual meeting of the Ecology Society of America after Brendan Bohannan of the BioBE Center at the University of Oregon and Tom Bruns of BIMERC at the University of California organized a session entitled “The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of …