I went to Maker Faire a couple of weeks ago and came across a company called Initial State, who makes beautiful software where you can look at your built environment data in real time dashboards. In this blog post, they have a tutorial on how make a simple “Home Environment Hub” to monitor different variables inside of a room: …
We write a fair bit about antibiotic resistance on this blog, but seldom about the alternatives. Obviously, medicine shouldn’t avoid using antibiotics altogether, but we do need better management and use of our current anti-microbial compounds. We also need new methods of treating infection. Nature News has a brief but informative list of antibiotic alternatives written by …
A nice article by Robert Lee Hotz in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal called “Designing a Hospital to Better Fight Infection“. The article summarizes data from the 3-year Hospital Microbiome Project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York. and quotes Emily Landon, Julie Segre, James Meadow, Jack Gilbert, and Jessica Green. From the article: …
There are few constants in this world. One exception, however, is the passing of day to night, which has gone on without fail since life first emerged on Earth. Early life quickly learned to anticipate changes associated with light and dark. This ability to tell time – to peer into the immediate future – was …
Just heading back (on the train) from the Association of Health Care Journalists 2015 which was in Santa Clara, where I participated in a session on The Microbiome. The session participants: Jonathan Eisen, Ph.D., professor, School of Medicine and College of Biological Sciences, University of California Susan Lynch, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine, University of California, …
Counter Culture Labs is a company that stemmed from an MIT iGEM team that made synthetic cheese. Their goal is to make vegan cheese that tastes just like the real thing with the single important difference being it is not derived from a cow, but rather a lab bench. Synthetic food is starting to trend. …
I admit, I am intrigued by the use of baby cages in recent history. Under what circumstances is outdoor air better than indoor air – from a microbial exposure perspective – is an ongoing and fascinating question. The image of a baby hanging out a window in a chicken-wire cage graphically encapsulates that debate. Talk of baby cages …
A recent NPR article raised the concern of drug-resistant food poisoning. Specifically, Ciprofloxacin-resistant Shigella. This strain was imported with US travellers coming from all over the world, but has now spread around the nation. Doctors are now starting to treat multi-drug resistant Shigella using IV instead of oral antibiotics. The article states: Multidrug-resistant Shigella has caused several outbreaks …
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 …
So I just saw this news story: Lawrence Tynes sues Tampa Bay Buccaneers claiming MRSA infection ended career. It seems that Tynes and some others think MRSA is lurking in the Tamba Bay Buccaneers facilities. This is yet another example of a sports league in need of a microbial ecologist. Lots of interest in Sports and …