Well, there is clearly some germophobia behind all of the coverage for this new study published in the Journal of Hospital Infection: Microbiological comparison of hand-drying methods: the potential for contamination of the environment, user, and bystander. by E.L. Best, P. Parnell, M.H. Wilcox. I have pasted their abstract below: Aim To compare the propensity of three …
Rob Knight, together with science journalist Brendan Buhler, has written a witty synopsis (entitled “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes”) about the human microbiome and how it affects human life in the form of a TED book, now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The description from Amazon’s webpage is below: “Allergies, asthma, obesity, …
Today, humans spend ~90% of their lives roaming the ‘great indoors’, which is very different from the outdoor environments where we co-evolved with our commensal microbiota (Kelley and Gilbert, 2013). We are just beginning to understand how the design of built environments (BEs) influences our microbiome, and how these interactions, in turn, might affect human …
As people have probably noticed, we have an increasing number of guests posts here on microBEnet, which is awesome. This is intended to be a community resource, and we’ve been actively reaching out and recruiting people to post about their work here. To that end, I’ve just made a tutorial video that walks you through …
(Note: This post is by Hal Levin) The Alfred P. Sloan foundation has approved a grant to ISIAQ, the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, to organize a symposium at the Healthy Buildings 2015-Europe conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands, May 18- 20, 2015. The Symposium organization project will be led by Hal Levin of …
A new volume of Studies in Mycology was published recently and is dedicated to the diversity in the fungal genera Aspergillus, Penicillium and Talaromyces, all of which play a significant role indoors. The issue includes 6 papers related to our Indoor Mycota Barcode of Life (IM-BOL) project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program …
To all of the microbial researchers out there, be careful about contaminants in your cultures, reagents, and equipment! Yes, we all are careful about good techniques and having proper controls. However, this article suggested that perhaps contaminants are surfacing much more in microbial related literature than we thought. This concept isn’t new, and the aforementioned …
This meeting seems like it may be of interest to many in the microBEnet community: Building Health Initiative. It is not clear if there will be much there specifically about microbes but there are many topics that clearly could be connected to microbes in various ways. So this might be worth checking out.
Thanks to a recent tweet, I saw a paper I would have surely otherwise missed: A method for sampling microbial aerosols using high altitude balloons in the Journal of Microbiological Methods. A method for sampling microbial aerosols using high altitude balloons w/ @nbryan5 http://t.co/jyXLOjEdP7 — Cameron Thrash (@DrJCThrash) November 11, 2014 The proud LSU Tiger …
I wrote this for the Google Scholar blog where it was posted recently.  I am reposting it here becuase I thought it might be of interest to the microBEnet audience.