After some off-line dialogue related to my “Should you lick your baby’s dropped pacifier?” blog post, I have decided to post a separate comment regarding the hygiene hypothesis, mentioned in the introduction, and the plasticizer hypothesis, emphasized by some off-line correspondents. What is clear is that in the modern, human-occupied indoor environment, there are microbes …
UPDATED AT BOTTOM – TURNS OUT NEWS STORY WAS VERY MISLEADING Wow. Just got pointed to this news story: BBC News – Closing hospital windows ‘increases infection risk’. It reports on work from Cath Noakes from the University of Leeds. The work is published in a non open-access journal “Building and Environment” which I do not …
A new meeting report is out in the SIGS journal: The Hospital Microbiome Project: Meeting Report for the 1st Hospital Microbiome Project Workshop on sampling design and building science measurements, Chicago, USA, June 7th-8th 2012. | Smith | Standards in Genomic Sciences. The report discusses a meeting involving many interested in microbiology of the built environment …
I’ve put together a collection of photos from the first few sampling events for our microbes in space project (Project MERCCURI). This will be updated as we receive photos from events over the next 6 months or so.
The Health in Buildings Roundtable will meet Tuesday, April 23rd from 8 to 4:30 at the Natcher Center on the NIH campus in Bethesda. The line-up includes a diverse set of speakers and topics. We saw nothing in the program posted on line mentioning microbial ecology, microbiology, or microbes, but the program might be of …
So last night was the first large-scale public microbial sampling event for project MERCCURI (a.k.a. Microbes in Spaaaace!). Around 330 teachers from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) conference bought tickets to the game. After the game many of them came down on the court to take photos, shoot baskets and sample the microbes on …
Today our Project MERCCURI team gave a presentation at the National Science Teacher Association (NSTA) meeting in San Antonio. We talked mostly about the project, but also about ways that teachers could incorporate microbiology of the built environment in their classrooms. There’s a lot of interest in taking the kinds of work being done in …
The University of Chicago has just opened a massive new hospital on the university campus. Jack Gilbert is PI on a study of the evolution of the hospital microbiome funded by the Sloan Foundation. The evolution of the microbiomes in a set of hospital rooms is being studied continuously beginning before the hospital accepted the …
Lee Ann Kahlor and her team at the University of Texas Interviewed nearly fourscore U.S. researchers in academia, government, defense and private industry to try to understand researchers’ perceptions of the challenges and opportunities for science communication to a wider audience (lay and decision makers). Here is what Dr. Kahlor said about the work: “Two …
Growing microbes in space sounds cool. Collecting microbes from sporting events is also cool (“excuse me, could I see that basketball after the game?”). Having fans collect samples with a chance that some of them will fly to the space station is a great way to engage people. Put them all together and you get …