There is an article by Carrie Arnold in the new issue of EHP (Environmental Health Perspectives) should be of interest to some people out there: EHP — Rethinking Sterile: The Hospital Microbiome. In the article, Carrie Arnold discusses Jack Gilbert’s hospital microbiome project, hospital acquired infections, DNA based surveys of microbes, and work from the …
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has posted a gallery of satellite measurements of nitrogen dioxide, taken by the Aura spacecraft. The results show a clear, nation-wide decline in this type of air pollution from 2005 to 2011. There are a lot of contributing factors for the reduction. This period includes the beginning of the Great …
A group of us from Jonathan Eisen’s lab attended the General Meeting for the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) last month in Boston. A major highlight of the conference was “We Are Not Alone: Microbial Revelations of the Built Environment,” a symposium that was organized by the Junior Advisory Group that is made up of postdocs and …
“Susceptibility of green and conventional building materials to microbial growth” Indoor Air journal, accepted for publication Abstract Green building materials are becoming more popular. However, little is known about their ability to support or limit microbial growth. The growth of fungi was evaluated on five building materials. Two green, two conventional building materials and wood …
Well, who would have thought. Just yesterday a paper came out from the BioBE Center on how the microbes on cell phones reflect the microbiome of the person using the phone (Meadow JF, Altrichter AE, Green JL. (2014) Mobile phones carry the personal microbiome of their owners. PeerJ 2:e447). In the paper they comment …
In 2011, David Coil posted about one of our most utilized mobile built environments-the cars we drive every day (or maybe not, if we adhere to an environmentally friendly lifestyle). A small study had just come out, in which the authors had attempted to identify the bacteria and molds present in cars in different climates. As …
The Microbiology of the Built Environment Network (http://microBE.net – this website) has made it into the community page at PLoS Biology! Our article has been in the works for some time, and we’re now pleased to announce its official publication: Bik HM, Coil DA, Eisen JA (2014) microBEnet: Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community …
One of the issues that was raised in the recent Microbiology of the Built Environment conference in Boulder was sampling, specifically what and how is the material collected for subsequent biological analysis. Industrial hygienists and those tackling questions of exposure have devoted a lot of time to developing methods for how to study the indoor …
I recently started thinking about becoming more active on Twitter, but I’m not sold on it. I’m purposely bringing this up in this forum because I know there are lot of microbe.net readers who are also active Twitter users, so I’m hoping to spark a discussion. Here’s why I’m interested in Twitter, and why I’m …
Well if you have not yet read Russell Neches post on wooden cheeseboards and the FDA you should. Cheeseboards on the chopping block : Survival on wood and plastic surfaces. I am writing here as a follow up to that to just point out some of the varied coverage of the FDA vs. the …