You’ve probably heard that the ocean is full of plastic. Here is a guest post about a current crowdfunding campaign to explore the microbes that colonize plastic. Professor Ana Maria Barral from National University (http://www.nu.edu/), a private non-profit in California has launched a crowdfunding campaign to support a recently started project to explore the microbes …
Am posting this email I just received: Good afternoon — The Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application committee and staff are pleased to announce that the webcast videos and presentations from our second data-gathering meeting, held on June 20-21, 2016, are now available to be viewed. You can access the videos and …
Got pointed to this by Ameet Pinto on Twitter and it seems likely of interest @microBEnet folks – this seems very relevant. cc @phylogenomics @davidacoil https://t.co/XWsIrRMOUi – Ameet Pinto (@watermicrobe) July 15, 2016 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js From the site: The Microbiome and the Environment Microorganisms are Earth’s oldest life forms and have come to inhabit virtually every …
Microbes and the built environment sensu stricto This short review in Trends in Microbiology is open access, very relevant for this blog, and received quite some press. Review: Buildings, Beneficial Microbes, and Health – Jordan Peccia, Sarah E. Kwan – Trends in Microbiology (OA) Bacteria and fungi in buildings exert an influence on the human …
The Biology & Built Environment Center hosted a Microbiome Science Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon on May 27th, 2016 at the University of Oregon. You can view the MeetUp page for this event here. The objective of this event was to facilitate the contribution of microbiome science edits & topics to a globally-used, public knowledge resource (Wikipedia). We …
“Don’t tell me what you found.” “Oh my gosh it must be disgusting!” “Can people transfer vaginal microbes to each other?” These are some of the questions we’ve gotten from subway riders and press. Despite these reactions, our study on the Boston subway system is now out on MSystems! Recently, there has been a rise …
This last winter, Gwynne Mhuireach at the University of Oregon taught a really interesting course entitled “Human Health and the Design of the Urban Microbiome”. She posted a description of the final “design charrette” here on microBEnet awhile back. I just asked her if she’d be willing to share her course materials for others interested …
This is a story of my first involvement pushing a publication that wanted to be University owned “all rights reserved” to becoming one released under a Creative Commons license. I’m not sure that the arcane details will be of interest to many people, but I think there’s an important lesson here about sticking to your …
Imagine a city skyline — what do you see? Skyscraper peaks, metallic sheens, sand-colored stones, rusty brickreds, dirty white plaster, glinting windows? That is a lot of surface area! I am curious about what can be eking out a living on all of these different surfaces, and how it might be contributing to urban ecosystems. In …
Back in September 2014 I was invited to write a book chapter on citizen science in microbiology. After several iterations of the book, the chapter, and the licensing agreement here is the final version. The book came out yesterday, here’s a link to the entire book on Amazon (“The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science“) …