You may have heard the saying that “a butterfly flaps its wings and…” insert your absurd unintended, chaotic, massive consequence here (e.g., a hurricane). We may not have much control over butterflies, but we do make choices as industries, governments, and individuals on which products we produce, regulate, and consume. Examples of such products that …
On September 22-23, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation sponsored a workshop at UC Berkeley entitled: Workshop to advance fungi in the built environment. It was the second workshop the Foundation sponsored to strengthen specific areas within their Microbiology of the Built Environment, the first workshop being on Building Science that Brent Stephens wrote about previously. The workshop …
Guest Blog Post by Dr. Nick Clements, PhD Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Colorado Boulder, Miller Research Group In the event of a disaster, hospitals must have plans in place for receiving a surge of patients with a variety of possible infectious diseases or conditions. Pandemic-causing infectious diseases, such as the viruses that caused the SARS …
Great news here: Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research pledges to make its research open to all. Matt Kaiser – the Head of Research has written this up in a blog post. It is worth reading the whole article. I note – I really hope that the Sloan Foundation can take this approach in the “microbiology of the …
Personally, I find this article pretty disturbing: Iowa City VA patients not told about bacteria problem. Basically, the story is, that the bacterium that causes Legionnaires disease (Legionella pneumophila) has been found in the water system at a VA hospital in Iowa. And the managers of the hospital say “But they said they’ve been able to control the …
Some new papers that may be of interest to people: FOAM (Functional Ontology Assignments for Metagenomes): a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) database with environmental focus. Statistical Methods for Functional Metagenomic Analysis Based on Next-Generation Sequencing Data PhD thesis from Pookhao, Naruekamol Profile Hidden Markov Models for the Detection of Viruses within Metagenomic Sequence Data Parallel-META 2.0: Enhanced …
Just got pointed to this by Sharon Strauss, the chair of the Evolution and Ecology department here at UC Davis: The Science of Science Communication II Sackler Colloquium. This is a collection of papers from a colloquium held in Septment 2013. Slides and videos of the talks are available online. The papers and links (copied from the …
Just a quick conference announcement here for “Human Connection: the Roles of Materials, Human Performance, and Research Translation in Health-Centered Buildings” sponsored by the US Green Building council to be held in Bethesda MD on November 10th. Information from the website below: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Health in Buildings Roundtable (HiBR), U.S. Green …
Well, the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meting ended one week ago. And it was a great meeting. I am writing up some reflections of the meeting which I will post in a few days. But for now I thought I would post a little note that I am experimenting with a new (for me) approach …
Just a quick post here. Some may have noticed that more of the posts here at microBEnet than say, a year ago, are not focused explicitly about “microbiology of the Built Environment” (MoBE). They are instead sometimes focused on microbiology, history of microbiology, architecture, methods in microbial ecology, bioinformatics tools, and more. There is a reason …