One of the difficulties working within the microbiology of the built environment is making sure that the relevant information crosses over the boundaries between building science and microbial ecology since those two groups tend to attend different meeting and read different journals. That’s one of the reasons that we’ve worked to hard to sponsor microbiology …
Sloan Symposium II — Healthy Buildings 2012, Brisbane, Australia, July 9, 2012 written by Hal Levin – Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s microBEnet project under the Microbiology of the Built Environment program. Following up on the Symposium held at indoor Air 2011 in Austin, Texas, microBEnet organized another symposium to take place at …
(Announcement for the 2013 Genomic Standards Consortium, you can also check out their wiki) The GSC 15 Workshop The 15th Workshop of the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) Date: April 22-24, 2013 Location: National Institute of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA GSC 15, ‘Science enabled by Standards’, will be held on April 22-24, 2013 at the National …
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 …
“If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that …
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 …
This will be of interest to many I think: Science as an open enterprise – Report | Royal Society It is a comprehensive report from the Royal Society with links to videos, text, previous meetings, references, EPUBs, and more relating to a report that was released a few days ago. From the web site: Six key …