The Flint Water Crisis garnered national and international media coverage of elevated levels of lead in the water delivered to consumers’ taps. When the city of Flint began using the Flint River as its drinking water source without the addition of a corrosion inhibitor beginning in April 2014, the corrosive new water began to leach …
So there is this new paper out in the New England Journal of Medicine: Innate Immunity and Asthma Risk in Amish and Hutterite Farm Children – NEJM It is quite interesting and is getting a bunch of press including Barnyard Dust Offers a Clue to Stopping Asthma in Children Amish kids help scientists understand why …
I have some automated Google Scholar searches for MoBE related topics and recently a few theses came up in the searches and I thought I would post about them here Here is one: Indoor biological exposures : what can HVAC filter dust tell us? Author: Jennings, Wiley Charles from Kerry Kinney’s lab. Abstract: Because people in the US …
Quick post – paper of interest: Urban greenness influences airborne bacterial community composition Abstract Urban green space provides health benefits for city dwellers, and new evidence suggests that microorganisms associated with soil and vegetation could play a role. While airborne microorganisms are ubiquitous in urban areas, the influence of nearby vegetation on airborne microbial communities …
Got this by email: Registration to attend the third meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s committee on Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application is now open! This meeting will be held at the National Academies’ Beckman Center Auditorium at the University of Irvine, California on October 17-18, 2016. …
There is a really nice new paper out in mSystems (full disclosure – I am on the Board of Editors of the journal). The paper is from Brent Stephens and sums up a recent presentation of his. See What Have We Learned about the Microbiomes of Indoor Environments? Abstract: The advent and application of high-throughput …
Just a quick post about the fact that researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are sending radiation resistant (even radiation-loving) fungi for some experiments on the International Space Station (ISS). They are looking for changes that occur in microgravity after growth for 14 days on the ISS with respect to ground control strains. Very …
So both Hal Levin and I have posted and/or commented on the topic of plants “cleaning” the air in buildings. Most of what’s out there is either anecdotal or based on an old NASA study that would require hundreds of plants in a home to make any appreciable difference. Here’s a couple microBEnet posts on …
Just a quick post here. Multiple stories out about the Laying Hen Housing Research Project by the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply that maybe of interest. From: Hen housing trade offs: Food safety, workers and consumers | Food Safety News As it turns out, the food stores and restaurant chains promising to sell only cage-free eggs …
Rob Dunn is one of the true pioneers of Citizen Science and in Citizen Science projects involving microbes. And here is another fascinating project from Dunn and colleagues. The Wild Life of Showerheads Photo by Lea Shell- Rob Dunn Lab When Anton Von Leeuwenhoek, the first microbiologist, began to study microscopic life, he did so …