“In 2010, Americans were prescribed 258 million courses of antibiotics, a rate of 833 per thousand people. Such massive usage, billions of doses, has been going on year after year.” or so says Martin Blaser who has written a book (“Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues” published by Macmillan …
Definitely worth checking this out: Illumination, lighting technologies, and indoor environmental quality – Nazaroff – 2014 – Indoor Air – Wiley Online Library. It is an editorial for Indoor Air and has many interesting bits. Of particilar interest to me and microBEnet is the part about how lighting affects the microbiology of indoor spaces and also …
Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …
Most of us spend most of our time indoors amidst suspended biological particles — spores, pollen, bits of dead skin, bacteria, viruses, and so on. We care about these particles because they may have human health impacts (positive or negative), effects on building materials, and possible forensic uses. Two sources known to be important for …
I’m working on a manuscript describing the different and particular challenges scientists in various disciplines face when incorporating citizen science into their research. So, I thought I would go looking for other articles about it, and found one with the promising title A new dawn for citizen science by Jonathan Silvertown. I’m holed up in …
In Dirty Dog: Do Pets Track Bacteria in Your Home? on the Popular Science blog, science journalist Brooke Borel describes her recent experience contributing to the citizen science experiment called The Wild Life of Our Homes run by Rob Dunn and Holly Menninger at North Carolina State University. Here she presents a beautiful graphic depicting how the samples that …
Great article from Brooke Borel writing for NOVA Online, “Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem–The Future of Hospitals?”. This covers some of the background of microbiology in hospitals, discusses work by both the BioBE Center and microBEnet… and of course the Hospital Microbiome Project as well as the NICU study from Jill Banfield’s lab. The article …
Quick post here. This seems like a potentially useful tools for labs to keep track of their culture collections. We definitely need something like this in my lab. LIIS: A web-based system for culture collections and sample annotation | Forster | Journal of Open Research Software.
Animal shelters provide an essential and beneficial social service, caring for an estimated 9 million pets each year in the United States. Many animals entering a shelter are highly stressed and lack the benefits of standard veterinary care, including vaccinations. Moreover animal shelters are an intensive housing situation that amplifies the transmission of infectious diseases …
This past Saturday, my wife picked ‘Frozen’ for movie night (no, we don’t have kids). In the movie, one of the main characters was born with the power to freeze her surroundings, which she struggles to control. By the time, ‘Let It Go’ was playing, I couldn’t help but wonder how the repeated freezing of …