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. …
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 …
Just a quick post here. A few weeks ago I took part in a session at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas on “The Era of The Microbiome“. The session ended up being basically a discussion between myself and Carl Zimmer that was moderated by Bernat Ollie. Bernat did a great job of getting questions …
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 …
“Microbiome” is such a hot term these days. And one key question many ask is “what does it mean?” A related question is – “where did the term come from?” I tried to tackle this many years ago on my blog with a post: The human microbiome – term being used in many ways – but at …
This is the third of three posts about the planetary protection workshop I attended at NASA Ames from March 24-26, 2015. The first is here. I mentioned, in my last post on forward contamination, that reverse contamination is the primary concern for Planetary Protection (PP). In this context, reverse contamination refers to the transport of Martian …
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 …
Just got wind of this upcoming meeting, “Microbes in the City: Mapping the Urban Genome” that looks like it has a fantastic series of talks lined up. The meeting is a single day, June 19th, and is hosted by The New York Academy of Sciences and New York University. From the conference website, here’s the …