There are many possible ways in which climate change could impact human health. The U. S. Global Change Research Program has issued a new draft report on this topic and is soliciting public comments about this report (see USGCRP Climate for more information). The report is The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Kraftwerk – Radioactivity – Stop Sellafield concert 1992 Cockroaches are often portrayed as the only organism that can survive a nuclear disaster. Indeed, Discovery’s Mythbusters team found that about 10 percent of a group of cockroaches could survive 30 days of exposure to 10,000 radon units of cobalt 60, …
As people get more and more interested in the microbiology and microbiomes of the built environment, a critical additional step is to connnect this work to analyses of chemical compounds in the built environment. Studies of chemicals in the built environment have of course been going on for a long time (e.g., in studies of indoor …
Many of us are familiar with the story of the wolves in Yellowstone that scare away hungry elk herds from tasty young willows (although the ecology of Yellowstone is probably more complicated than that). Nonetheless many ecologists are keenly interested in what has been termed the ecology of fear in communities of plants, birds and mammals. The ecology of fear describes the role of …
Last week, I came across a paper in PLOS ONE that looked interesting, especially in the light of the recent mBio paper that looked at sewage as a reflection of a city’s human-associated microbiome (also see this recent post on MicroBEnet). In the PLOS ONE paper “The Source of the River as a Nursery for …
Finally got around to reading this paper “Drinking water microbiology – from measurement to management”. Seems like the number of culture-independent studies on drinking water keeps going up, it’s been a popular blog topic here in the last year. This review paper does a good job of summarizing the current state of knowledge, even including …
A new paper “Evolution of the Indoor Biome” is out and should be of interest to many who think about microbes in the built environment and related topics. The paper has quite an incredible collection of authors: NESCent Working Group on the Evolutionary Biology of the Built Environment, Laura J. Martinl, Rachel I. Adams, Ashley …
There is a new paper out that may be of interest to many: “When Data Sharing Gets Close to 100%: What Human Paleogenetics Can Teach the Open Science Movement”. It discusses an analysis of paleogenetics and the open science / open data practices in the field. This seems like it could be of relevance to the …
Dear metagenome method developers, The first challenge of the Initiative for the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) begins right now! Over the last three months, we received valuable feedback from the community playing with our toy data sets. We incorporated many of your suggestions, thanks again! Today, we proudly release the official data sets …
In this week’s Best of MicrobiomeDigest, we’ll look at the effect of a “sea voyage” on the human oral and belly button microbiome. For those of you who are not familiar with Fisherman’s Friend (I am not sure if these are as popular in the rest of the world as they are in parts of Europe), it’s a British …