Just out in today’s edition of PLoS Medicine: Adapting Standards: Ethical Oversight of Participant-Led Health Research. The article raises questions (in my mind) about the ethics related to human genome sequencing projects. We ask, what is “informed consent” when you have your genome sequence published? What about your children’s interests, your siblings’, your descendants’ and …
This is going to rock. Citizen microbiology – highlighted at the American Society for Microbiology Annual Meeting in Denver in May. The details on the session are below. Sunday May 19 at the American Society for Microbiology General Meeting in Denver. If you are interested in attending Register here. If you work on some aspect of …
Crossposting this from my Tree of Life blog. Just finally got around to doing the sampling of my house for the Wild Life of Our Homes microbial sampling project. I signed up online, got a kit, got a registration code, and did the sampling today. I swabbed the exterior door frame, an interior door frame, the kitchen …
A while back we posted about our microBEnet project to have undergraduates come into the lab and sequence reference genomes from the built environment. That project now has it’s own blog, being maintained by the students themselves. Comments about our original post led to the following guest post by Paul Orwin, who is doing something …
At the AAAS Meeting in Vancouver in February there was a session focusing on “The Earth Microbiome Project” and related topics. The session was organized by Jack Gilbert and had a series of talks that may be of interest to those concerned about the microbiology of the built environment. I gave a talk in the …
Just a quick one here. The Home Microbiome Project from Argonne National Lab is featured on the home page of Discover Magazine: Science and Technology News, Science Articles | Discover Magazine. This is part of a feature Discover has linking to SciStarter – a site about citizen science.
I am enjoying the posts to the Scientific American Blogs by Rob Dunn on his and other Citizen Science project(s) and I thought I would share here. Scientist Spots Missing Link in his Basement, but is too Sleepy to Catch it | Compound Eye, Scientific American Blog Network. The top 10 life-forms living on Lady …
Listening to this podcast this morning reminded me that we hadn’t yet made a plug for Rob Dunn’s awesome citizen science project “Domestic Biomes: The Wild Life of Your Home”. This project is collecting samples of people’s homes (and the people themselves) from all across the country, in both urban and rural environments. The samples …
The International Society of Exposure Science, ISES, will hold its annual conference October 23-27 in Baltimore. The Society has invited all participants to bring dust samples for its Metals in Dust Samples Study. “A special ISES Metals in House Dust Study will analyze house dust samples supplied by the meeting attendees and report results at …
Recently I wrote here about a new report on a citizen microbiology effort focusing on microbes in water heaters: More on citizen microbiology project from @Penn_State & @NASA on thermophiles in water heaters via @scicheer @Sci4Cits Well, a new paper in PLoS One (PLoS ONE: Aquarium Nitrification Revisited: Thaumarchaeota Are the Dominant Ammonia Oxidizers in Freshwater …