“Built environment” may be a stretch here but I thought this was pretty cool anyway. Some researchers dug up a trio of 500-year old Incan mummies on top on a volcano that were remarkably well-preserved. This intrigued microbiologists who sampled the site and found a surprisingly low diversity of organisms present.
I just have to post about this, even though I can find no verification whatsoever for this story. I think the concept of probiotics for buildings is a useful thought exercise, and have posted about it in the past. I’m also aware that since we don’t have anything close to a reasonable understanding of microbial …
Over the last few months we’ve acquired a few “draft” blog posts on various news items that never seemed to develop into full-fledged blog posts. Rather than let them suffer in silence, I thought I’d post them as a compilation: A story about finding low levels of MRSA in Chicago-area ambulances. Instead of the usual …
This will be of interest to many I think: Science as an open enterprise – Report | Royal Society It is a comprehensive report from the Royal Society with links to videos, text, previous meetings, references, EPUBs, and more relating to a report that was released a few days ago. From the web site: Six key …
Beyond recent posts about Legionella, we don’t talk a lot about the built environment of municipal water systems, although Norm Pace and his group at CU Boulder have done extensive work on the topic in recent years. Therefore I thought I’d better point to this study, published a couple of weeks ago in Environmental Health …
CBC Radio has a podcast on the “hotel microbe” story that was all the buzz at the #ASM2012 meeting last week: Hotel Rooms and Bacteria. I note – I was interviewed by Michael about this but am traveling and have not been able to listen to the podcast as of yet so listen at your own …
Well, investigations of Legionella outbreaks always seem to involve a combination of microbiology and building science so I thought I would post this link here: BBC News – Edinburgh Legionnaires’ outbreak: Cooling towers ‘likely’ source. I wonder how much Legionella is showing up in other buildings – especially in DNA based surveys – even when people …
Of possible interest to readers here. On my Tree of Life blog I have been compiling a list of microbiology focused blogs: The Tree of Life: Collecting links to blogs that focus entirely or partly on microbiology topics #ASM2012. We will be adding these to the microbiology blogroll here soon.
(This is a guest post by David Thaler, who is one of the Sloan-funded investigators working on the microbiology of the built environment. The goal is to spark substantive discussion, so please comment below!) A few thoughts after the Inaugural meeting of Microbiology of the Built Environment Boulder My own opinions on these points are …
As a microbiologist learning a little bit about building science, I was fascinated to hear early on about how little was actually known about the causative effect of particular microbes on human health in the built environment. I had assumed that we knew a lot about which species of fungi (mold) and bacteria caused problems …