Science papers about mosquitoes in urban parks and purses as fomites, and popular press articles about dirty menus in restaurants and filtering bacteria with book pages. Here is a good song to match the latter two: Turn the Page by Metallica. Diversity and abundance of mosquitoes (Diptera:Culicidae) in an urban park: Larval habitats and temporal variation – Antônio …
Social media has a lot of utilities, but who would have thought it could be useful in tracking down food illness sources? This article from The Washington Post discusses how Twitter and Yelp have been successfully used by health agencies in New York and Chicago to preempt restaurant inspections. Although this is by no means a miracle …
A recent New York Times article by Katie Rogers talks about an odd solution to California’s dwindling water supply. LA county is using small black balls that float on the surface of reservoir water to block UV and heat. This prevents both evaporation and algae growth from occurring. With California’s drought persistently eating away at our …
Well this is certainly very interesting and filled with all sorts of topics of relevance to microbiology of the built environment: Source: Did a moldy building kill 4 New Orleans college professors? | NOLA.com. I am by no means a mold expert so I am not sure I can comment much on the …
Recent papers about microbiology of the built environment and water treatment. Two of them are about fish, so here is a 70s classic rock song in a modern version, to go with this post: Barracuda by Heart and Fergie. Open Access: Temporal and Spatial Stability of Ammonia-Oxidizing Archaea and Bacteria in Aquarium Biofilters – Bagchi, Siegfried E. Vlaeminck, …
The University of Oregon published this announcement on AAAS’ EurekAlert: Oregon architecture researchers to study indoor air quality in 72 homes. So a good song to play while reading this post would be: “Portland, Oregon” ‌‌by Loretta Lynn & Jack White. The press release starts off with a short summary of this project: University of Oregon researchers and industry partners …
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.
Suppose you owned a warehouse that serves as a distribution hub for grocery stores, and you find that every so often, someone is pooping in your warehouse. Not only is that insulting and obnoxious, but it also has the potential to make a lot of people very sick. You take the shift schedule, and you correlate …
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 …
Here is a guest post by UC Berkeley junior Alex Martin who is working with us on a study of the Berkeley Animal Shelter It’s no secret that animals — including humans — serve as a nutrient-rich reservoir for microorganisms. And while the grooming habits of felines may have earned them a reputation as refreshingly …