And it will change how we think about construction here on Earth. Source: Genetically Engineered Bacteria Will Get Construction Jobs on Mars | Inverse Not 100% sure what to think of this story but it certainly is interesting. The basic summary: Jacqueline Ronson has written an article for Inverse about work by a group from Newcastle …
Just a mini post here. Got pointed to this press release of possible interest on a collaboration to study microbes on the space station and on other spacecrafts using single cell approaches: Source: NASA, Bigelow Laboratory Study Microbes on Spacecrafts – Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences
In parallel to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation offer of two postdoctoral fellowships to study the microbiology of the ISS, NASA is also issuing a pair of postdoc fellowships on their end. The collaboration between Sloan and NASA is great to see, since there is significant overlap between their interests in this field. I’m really …
This is so awesome. The Sloan Program in Microbiology of the Built Environment is offering a pair of postdoc fellowships to work on the microbiology of the International Space Station. Summary of the call is below, the compete information packet can be downloaded here. And if that’s not cool enough, the next blog post is …
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 …
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“) …
On April 11 there was a meeting in Washington DC that was part of an effort from a new study being conducted by the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering on “Microbiomes of the Built Environment”. Videos and slides from the meeting have now been posted. I have compiled them below. In addition, I …
Our latest Project MERCCURI paper came out last week and so I figured I’d do a quick post about it here since it’s a good fit for the microbiology of the built environment. In short, we collected a number of bacterial strains from built environments on earth and sent them to the space station to …