Just got a copy of the July/Aug issue of Discover and, well, discovered that this is the issue with the following article: Earth’s Last Unexplored Wilderness: Your Very Own Home | Ecosystems | DISCOVER Magazine. It is alas available online only to subscriber’s but for those interested in microbiology of the built environment, it is worth …
A new paper is discussed in this press release that is of interest to studies of microbiology of the built environment: UC HealthNews : Infants Exposed to Specific Molds Have Higher Asthma Risk. From the lab of Tiina Reponen who is involved in various studies on this topic. The online article is here: Full Text though it is not freely …
Nice mini feature on Noah Fierer in the the New Scientist: Intrepid explorer of the microbe jungle in your home The feature is basically an interview with Graham Lawton and covers many topics of interest to studies of “microbiology of the built environment.” Good stuff in there on natural history, germaphobia, toilets and more. Definitely worth …
My last post was about mummy burial sites, so now let’s talk about nuclear waste repositories. There are so many kinds of built environments to chase microbes in. This report is about some microbiology being done in a deep geological repository that is a model site for nuclear waste storage. The work seems mostly culture-based, …
“Built environment” may be a stretch here but I thought this was pretty cool anyway. Some researchers dug up a trio of 500-year old Incan mummies on top on a volcano that were remarkably well-preserved. This intrigued microbiologists who sampled the site and found a surprisingly low diversity of organisms present.
I just have to post about this, even though I can find no verification whatsoever for this story. I think the concept of probiotics for buildings is a useful thought exercise, and have posted about it in the past. I’m also aware that since we don’t have anything close to a reasonable understanding of microbial …
Over the last few months we’ve acquired a few “draft” blog posts on various news items that never seemed to develop into full-fledged blog posts. Rather than let them suffer in silence, I thought I’d post them as a compilation: A story about finding low levels of MRSA in Chicago-area ambulances. Instead of the usual …
Beyond recent posts about Legionella, we don’t talk a lot about the built environment of municipal water systems, although Norm Pace and his group at CU Boulder have done extensive work on the topic in recent years. Therefore I thought I’d better point to this study, published a couple of weeks ago in Environmental Health …
CBC Radio has a podcast on the “hotel microbe” story that was all the buzz at the #ASM2012 meeting last week: Hotel Rooms and Bacteria. I note – I was interviewed by Michael about this but am traveling and have not been able to listen to the podcast as of yet so listen at your own …
Well, investigations of Legionella outbreaks always seem to involve a combination of microbiology and building science so I thought I would post this link here: BBC News – Edinburgh Legionnaires’ outbreak: Cooling towers ‘likely’ source. I wonder how much Legionella is showing up in other buildings – especially in DNA based surveys – even when people …