Perhaps you’ve heard about Dr. Premsyl Bercik’s recent publication in Nature Communications about the link between the gut microbiome and mental disorders such as depression and anxiety disorder. In his study, he induced early life stress in conventional mice and in germ-free mice by separating new born pups from their mother for several hours a …
This article on the website of Michigan Radio had an intriguing title. Detective work traces bacteria in Michigan rivers back to leaky septic tanks – Rebecca Williams – Michigan Radio This is a nice story illustrating how the detection of marker bacteria can be used to track contamination of rivers and other environments with fecal matter, …
This is just a quick posting of some building science data that I collected during Day 1 of the 4th Annual Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment in Boulder, CO. I setup a couple of our Open Source Building Science Sensors (OSBSS) in the front corner of the room before the conference convened yesterday and left …
An automated Google Scholar search for “Indoor Microbiology” alerted me to this report from Mark Mendell: A Research Agenda on Assessing and Remediating Home Dampness and Mold to Reduce Dampness-Related Health Effects by Mark J. Mandell. This definitely seems of interest to the microbiology of the built environment crowd and anyone interested in moisture effects …
I saw the tweet below from James Scott first thing this morning, linking to a NY Times article about the tragic balcony collapse in Berkeley, CA two days ago: Fungi to blame for fatal Berkeley balcony collapse, via @nytimes http://t.co/MLWX24x4Z1 – James Scott (@jscott_toronto) June 18, 2015 From the article: The engineers said photographs taken by …
I went to Maker Faire a couple of weeks ago and came across a company called Initial State, who makes beautiful software where you can look at your built environment data in real time dashboards. In this blog post, they have a tutorial on how make a simple “Home Environment Hub” to monitor different variables inside of a room: …
A recent study from Su et al tests the effects of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) on the amount of culturable airborne bacteria in elementary school classrooms. As expected, they found lower concentrations of these bacteria with UVGI treatment. Only the first page of the paper is available, unfortunately, so perhaps this is already addressed, but it …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: “Fade to Grey” by Visage A new paper in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology touches upon some interesting viewpoints. The paper is called Dysbiotic drift: mental health, environmental grey space, and microbiota, and was written by Alan C Logan. And it’s Open Access, which we all appreciate! The article, which is rather …
As the oldest daughter of 3rd generation HVAC/plumbing/electrical small business owners, I held my share of flashlights on service calls and even wrapped ductwork one summer. I loved fiddling and building with the different tools, left-over bits of copper tubing, and other miscellaneous tidbits from jobs. But my heart was more into asking questions about living …
A recent study form Ling et al explored microbial community succession on concrete. They examined the concrete in two sewage manholes over a year using 16S rRNA sequencing. Concrete is a huge part of urban environments, and corrosive microbes eat it away. This causes structural damage, which is especially unwanted in sewage systems. The abstract for the …