I gave a talk recently at the Future of Genomic Medicine meeting in San Diego that I thought might be of interest to some here. I posted the slides to Slideshare. See below: Talk for #FOGM15: Challenges and Opportunities in Microbiome Studies and the Rise of Citizen Microbiology from Jonathan Eisen I also recorded the …
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 …
After a truly amazing response to the Knight Lab’s Poop MOOC that was offered last fall (19,000 students signed up!), we have decided to offer this course again in On Demand format, which allows more flexibility for those who sign up for the course. Students will be able to access the course from May-December 31, …
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 …
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 …
Now for something lighter. The website Science Daily reported on a study at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, to look at mold in houses reported to be haunted. The news announcement reports, “By comparing these samples to samples from places with no reported hauntings, the researchers hope to identify factors unique to the haunted …
Just got sent this article (thanks Paula Olsiewski) “The Passive House in New York” which is an interesting article about the increasingly popular concept of passive houses. As the name suggests, passive houses maintain an appropriate ambient temperature without heating or cooling, mostly through airtights seals, a lot of insulation, and some sort of air exchange …
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 …
This is the second of three posts about the planetary protection workshop I attended at NASA Ames from March 24-26, 2015. The first is here (and here.) Forward contamination, in the context of planetary protection, refers to the transport of microbes from Earth to Mars. The title of the workshop, and many talk titles refer to “human …