Suppose you owned a warehouse that serves as a distribution hub for grocery stores, and you find that every so often, someone is pooping in your warehouse. Not only is that insulting and obnoxious, but it also has the potential to make a lot of people very sick. You take the shift schedule, and you correlate …
As the oldest daughter of 3rd generation HVAC/plumbing/electrical small business owners, I held my share of flashlights on service calls and even wrapped ductwork one summer. I loved fiddling and building with the different tools, left-over bits of copper tubing, and other miscellaneous tidbits from jobs. But my heart was more into asking questions about living …
There is an article about the NY Subway Microbiome study by Bethany Brookshire that is worth checking out: Making a microbe subway map | Student Science. It discusses how high school students helped in the subway microbiome study that came out recently (see the post by Chris Mason about this here: The long road from Data to …
Aaron Darling, faculty member of University of Technology Sydney (who used to work with me here at UC Davis) has a very important and interesting read on his blog: Not so fast, FastTree. In it he discusses some informatics archaeology he did (digging around in some code) regading the program FastTree which many researchers have been using …
Microbiomes are everywhere. Not only inside and around us, but also in the scientific literature. Not too many years ago, only a handful of microbiology laboratories were analyzing the composition of the invisible communities that surround us. Today, it feels as if every other scientist is doing something microbiome-related. New techniques such as high-throughput sequencing and …
Quick post here. I discovered this a few weeks ago but just have not had time to write about it in detail or even scrutinize it exceptionally carefully but it seems of interest to the theme here at microBEnet: Invisible City Life: The Urban Microbiome | The Nature of Cities. By Marina Alberti from the University of …
IBM and Mars put out a joint press release today announcing a new effort to use metagenomics to study microorganisms in the food supply chain. The new initiative, called the Sequencing the Food Supply Chain Consortium (SFSC), will use metagenomics and metatranscriptomics to establish what they call a “microbial baseline” that can later be used …
Nice article on the Your Wild Life blog: Your Wild Life — A Whole New Way of Doing Citizen Science, Maybe. It discusses a collaobration between Your Wild Life and Holly Bik on visuliazation data from the citizen science – microbiome work that has been a part of the Your Wild Life project. The collaboration has involved …
I am starting to think a lot about the connections between architecture and microbiology – in part in preparation for the American Institute for Architects Annual Meeting in Atlanta May 14-16 where I will be participating in sessions on “microbes in the built environment” The tentative details for the sessions are Session: Microbes in the Built Environment: Perspectives …
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.