Just discovered this site from Georgia Tech: Built Environment + Public Health Clearinghouse. It has some useful information about schools, courses, training activities and general information relating to what they call “at this critical intersection of health and place.” Some of the resources are pretty minimal but there is still a lot there that I found helpful …
I’m proud to announce that the sample collection for the building science component of Project MERCCURI is complete! In early May, Koichi Wakata from JAXA (Japan’s space exploration agency) collected swabs swabs of surfaces aboard the International Space Station. Back in June last year, Jenna, Wendy and I went to the Johnson Space Center in …
Just discovered this site from the CDC dedicated to information about Helthcare Associated Infections: Healthcare-associated infections | HAI | CDC. It has a great collection of links and resources including links to data, research, prevention methods, and more. Definitely worth checking out if you have any interest in HAIs or hospital associated microbes.
For the last few months I have been working on building up on microBEnet social media resources relating to “Building Sciences” and the “Built Environment.” One aspect of this search has been to look for blogs that focus at least in part on “Building Sciences” or the “Built Environment.” This has been much more difficult than collecting …
Just came across this article entitled “Rainwater harvesting tanks enable spread of dangerous pathogens, study shows”. The article describes a fairly straightforward set of findings from rainwater storage tanks in South Africa. Researchers found Legionella, Klebsiella, Giardia, Salmonella, and Yersinia. Not a friendly-sounding list of bugs. However, I have the usual set of issues with …
With a URL asking “is this the most important building in the country?”, I had to check this one out. This article from SmartPlanet describe the “Facility for Low Energy Experiments (FLEXLab)”, housed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in CA. Basically it’s a fancy building that allows designers, architects, builders and others to test various …
OK. I know. Microbes are everywhere. And so we need to get away from sensationalizing another study of “germs” in some environment. But in this case, I confess, I was a bit grossed out: “Kiddie pools are hotspots of bacteria, expert says” from the Visalia Times. A version of the story is also on Medline …
Well I for one am not convinced about the high tech indoor farms being the future of “market gardening”: High-tech farming: The light fantastic | The Economist. Sure, being able to control conditions has many uses. And those pesky seasons and the outdoor world in general is pretty annoying right? This article in the Economist ends …
Just a quick post — some may find this of interest: ‘Dirty’ air in subdivided flats pose health hazards | South China Morning Post. It reports on a study (not quite sure where it was published, if it was) about bacterial counts from air samples from subdivided living units in Hong Kong public housing. And many …
Shared post by Rachel Adams & James Meadow As intrepid scientists working to understand the interactions between humans, buildings, and the microbes we share, a recently published review paper caught our attention. The piece, Recent Advances in the Microbiology of the Built Environment, by Konya and Scott, set out to synthesize what has been learned …