Cross posting this from my Tree of Life blog: Well I am very excited about this article in the Boston Globe today: Ecosystem, sweet ecosystem – The Boston Globe. By Courtney Humphries the article discusses the Sloan Foundation program in the “Indoor Environment” that is focusing on microbial ecology of the built environment. I am, well, really into …
Are you a building scientist curious to learn more about molecular techniques for studying microbes? Are you a microbial ecologist hoping to get a bit of background on ribosomal RNA surveys? Then check our our new and improved “Simple Guides”. These are the start of what we hope will be a larger collection of documents …
As we’ve posted in the past, Mendeley is a great community resource and one that we’re using to create a reference collection of papers relating to the microbiology of the built environment. One of the really useful things about a reference manager like Mendeley is the ability to have tags associated with articles such as …
This post is about Microbiology of the Built Environment Mendeley group … Social networking and bibliographies may not seem like they go together well. But actually, they do. In the last few years there has been a movement to “socialize” bibliographies and reference collections. There are many many many systems for doing this, some better than …
For those interested in microbiology of the built environment you might want to consider going to Healthy Buildings 2012 July 8 – 12, 2012 in Brisbane. There will be a few sessions there with a microbial focus including, for example, “Infection spread: will breathing kill you?”
Recently I wrote here about a new report on a citizen microbiology effort focusing on microbes in water heaters: More on citizen microbiology project from @Penn_State & @NASA on thermophiles in water heaters via @scicheer @Sci4Cits Well, a new paper in PLoS One (PLoS ONE: Aquarium Nitrification Revisited: Thaumarchaeota Are the Dominant Ammonia Oxidizers in Freshwater …
I love citizen science. And I dream of doing citizen microbiology. Thus I love the project going on at Penn. St. on getting people to sample microbes in hot water heaters (posted a mini note about it a while ago). There is a good article about this project on the Science For Citizens blog here: …
Well, kudos I suppose to the headline writer for this one: Your faeces, my furry friend, are blowin’ in the wind – health – 12 August 2011 – New Scientist. The article is about recent work by Noah Fierer and colleagues on bacteria in outdoor air in cities. Not exactly microbiology of the built environment …
Wow. Jessica Green is certainly helping spread the word about microbes in buildings. There is an article in smartplanet from Aug 6 about her work: Ecologists, designers explore new ‘architecture-biology interface’ | SmartPlanet. The article discusses her recent Ted talk and some of her work at the BioBE Center.
Interesting blog post from the BioBE Center worth checking out regarding Unsavory sources of bacteria in urban air referencing a new paper from Noah Fierer and others. Alas the paper is not OpenAccess and even I can’t get a copy of it right now. But it seems interesting …