Another quick post here. There is a story by Markham Heid in Time of potential interest: You Asked: Is My Air Conditioner Killing Me? | TIME. A bit sensationalist as a headline but has some good discussion and quotes in it including some interesting comments from Mark Mendell about indoor microbes.
Just a quick post. There is a story of interest at “Inside Philanthropy” on the Sloan Foundation MoBE (microbiology of the built environment) Program and the renewal of the BioBE center project. See Sloan’s Deep (and Kind of Gross) Probe Into the Microbes Crawling All Around You – Inside Philanthropy: Fundraising Intelligence – Inside Philanthropy Although I …
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 new paper from Van Bonn et al studies the effect of a water change on the bacterial community of an aquarium. Unfortunately, only the abstract is available openly, but it seems pretty cool: The bacterial community composition and structure of water from an established teleost fish system was examined before, during and after a major water change …
We’ve posted previously about the results of the microbial playoffs in space (microbenet post here, and project website here). And while it’s fun to compare the growth of a microbe representing the Raiders to one representing the 49ers (Raiders won that one)… there’s a more serious question being asked here. We wanted to know what …
A recent publication in Environmental Science & Technology and subsequent review on Phys.org gave a lot of promise for the technology of using microbes to clean up waterways. The study suggested that harnessing microbes is an environmentally sustainable solution to breaking down pollutants in water. I think ‘breakthrough’ is a bit strong of an accolade …
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 …