Definitely worth checking this out: Illumination, lighting technologies, and indoor environmental quality – Nazaroff – 2014 – Indoor Air – Wiley Online Library. It is an editorial for Indoor Air and has many interesting bits. Of particilar interest to me and microBEnet is the part about how lighting affects the microbiology of indoor spaces and also …
Quick post here. This seems like a potentially useful tools for labs to keep track of their culture collections. We definitely need something like this in my lab. LIIS: A web-based system for culture collections and sample annotation | Forster | Journal of Open Research Software.
There are a bunch of stories out in relation to work from MIT on “Living Materials” See MIT News Engineers design ‘living materials’ Value Walk MIT Scientists Develop Living Materials Using 3-D Images Of Bacteria Gizmodo MIT’s Living E. Coli Materials Could Provide Self-Aware Surfaces The Register RISE of the LIVING CHAIR: Boffins recruit E coli to build futuristic …
At a recent meeting of the Sloan Foundation program on Microbiomes of the Built Environment I gave a talk about microBEnet and kind of begged people in the program to send me emails when they had new papers out so we could include them in our reference collection and could blog about them. And one …
Just saw the abstract of this paper: The effects of climbing vegetation on the local microclimate, thermal performance, and air infiltration of four building facade orientations that was published 3/19 in Building and Environment. Authors are Irina Susorova, Parham Azimi and Brent Stephens. I am intrigued from reading the abstract (I don’t have access to the whole paper). …
Just found an interesting new paper via automated Google Scholar searches: The Bio-Community Perl toolkit for microbial ecology. By Florent Angly, Christopher Fields, and Gene Tyson in Bioinformatics. Here is the abstract: Summary: The development of bioinformatic solutions for microbial ecology in Perl is limited by the lack of modules to represent and manipulate microbial community profiles …
Just got alerted by Paula Olsiewski & Eileen Choffnes to this paper Role of Transportation in Spread of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus Infection, United States by James Lowe, Phillip Gauger, Karen Harmon, Jianqiang Zhang, Joseph Connor, Paul Yeske, Timothy Loula, Ian Levis, Luc Dufresne, and Rodger Main. The paper is in the CDC journal “Emerging Infectious Diseases” and …
There was a recent flash in the news about the ‘5-second rule’ when a group of microbiologists at Aston University in the UK released results from a study (that, from what I can tell, is unpublished). The summary reads, “The study…monitored the transfer of the common bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus from …
You could say that I’m milking this one study design – one in which we surveyed the airborne microbial communities and surfaces around different units of a university housing complex – and you’d be right. But for good reason: it’s a powerful study design. We have replication of residential units of a common design across …
This interesting review article from 2012 bridges clinical Microbiology and the study of the built environment. Authors Borkow and Monk discuss various sources of nosocomial infections (NI) and a potential solution to the problem. Despite rigorous efforts to sterilize and sanitize hospitals, NI are persistent and pose a serious threat to patients who are already …