Here at microBEnet we are big fans of citizen science… focusing not surprisingly on citizen microbiology projects. We’ve hosted several workshops and conference sessions on the topic as well as running a couple of projects ourselves. Personally I think engaging people through the process of actually doing science is incredibly valuable and I hope the …
Just got done reading this article from the Guardian and it is distressing Guardian analysis reveals millions of customers were asked to used testing method condemned by the EPA which may flush out detectable lead content Source: Water utilities serving American cities use tests that downplay contamination | Environment | The Guardian by Jessica Glenza and Oliver Milman. The …
For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …
So many cool things in this post by Scott Chimileski at Small Things Considered: by Scott Chimileski | Have you ever visited a natural history museum and looked for microbe exhibits? If you have, I’d bet you didn’t find any. In my own searches, I usually see microbes represented only by some species names written …
Here is a quick post to show off a new figure based on some analysis of data from our kittybiome Kickstarter to sequence gut microbiome samples from cats. Modeled on similar participatory research projects for humans where participants submit fecal samples for bacterial characterization, we are characterizing the gut microbiome of domestic cats with a …
Great to see the White House is keeping going with its commitment to citizen science and crowdsourcing activities. They will be hosting a Web Forum on the topic on September 30th. See Open Science and Innovation: Of the People, For the People, By the People | whitehouse.gov In this they write: Only a small fraction of …
I’m enjoying making maps of participants for kittybiome, a new participatory research project on the microbiome of cats. It was very easy to make this map using Google Maps. (And using Google Maps is particularly appropriate for the project because we have a celebrity cat named NDA, who lives with inventor of Google Maps participating in the project.) Here …
. Sarah Zhang at Wired has updated her post from three years ago about bacteria in her apratment with reference to a new study just published from the Wildlife of Your Homes study of bacteria and fungi in homes. Definitely worth a look. Source: What I Learned From Sequencing the Bacteria in My Apartment | …
A little update here. Last week a group of us launched a new participatory science project on the microbiome of cats. It is called “kittybiome” and we have launched a Kickstarter fundraiser for the project — more information about the project and how one can get involved can be found at the Kickstarter home page: …
This is a quick post to introduce a project I have been developing over the past year and a half, called the Pittsburgh Water Microbiome (PWM) Project. I am aware of some other similar citizen science projects out there, so the goal of this post is to receive some feedback and advice, and open this …