Over the past few months, the Flint water crisis has been covered at length by various media outlets, including here on microBEnet. Here is an update on the situation from NY Times. The Legionnaire’s cases started popping up around June 2014. This article discusses the poor water management in Flint, as well as the inadequate response …
Just a quick post here to follow up on something I posted to Twitter. I am trying to compile information and guidelines people have on “How do give a journal club presentation” for students in particular but also for others. Any links, ideas, information, etc you have on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
This recent PLoS One article on Associations with Fungal DNA and Mycotoxins in Classroom Dust seems especially appropriate considering the blossoming of flowers and accompanying seasonal allergies that’s now happening in our part of the world. Sick building syndrome (SBS) is associated with the following symptoms: ocular, nasal, throat and dermal symptoms, headache and tiredness. Norback et al (2016) studied …
*This blog post highlights the backstory to my student’s project, which you can find here, on experiment.com. Discoveries in science can come from unexpected sources I became a scientist because my undergraduate mentor allowed me the opportunity to make my own discoveries. While a young student at Swarthmore College, my then mentor Rachel Merz gave …
Great opportunity If you are a student in the Master’s program, PhD student or post-doctoral fellow, if you believe that efficient, comfortable and healthy buildings are not only possible but necessary, if you are interested in building lasting collaborations and have fun doing it all, the summer school is for you. Event Description: ISIAQ summer …
So having gained a reputation as the toilet guy (e.g. Slate, RedOrbit, microBEnet) I felt like I just had to write about this article. Plus it sounds really cool. This article is by Jennifer Fouquier (also cool) who is in Scott Kelly’s lab at UC San Diego San Diego State. The title “Rapid assemblage of …
Last week, a bunch of news articles came out (like this one) that talk about how we are on track to figuring out new ways to tackle antibiotic resistant superbugs. The research they are referring to highlights a paper recently published in Nature (a closed access journal) by Changjiang Dong’s group at the University of East …
An artist named Joana Ricou has teamed up with microbiologists to create really awesome portraits of bacterial cultures of belly button microbes. There are more than 400 portraits and they are on display at the Art Laboratory Berlin as part of the exhibit Nonhuman Subjectivities.
The CDC recently had to correct an error in a flooring report – it was a silly calculation error that we have all made before, but that had a huge outcome. They forgot to convert feet to meters in their report, meaning they severely underestimated health risks related to formaldehyde in laminate flooring. The risks are …
Isolating interesting bacteria and sequencing their genomes has never been easier and our lab has worked extensively on this topic, particularly in the context of undergraduate education. Our first foray into this field came in 2011 with a group of students working on the “Built Environment Genomes Project” and eventually culminated in our Swabs to …