According to a recent BBC news article, NASA is doing a Mars simulation project to see if six live human beings can survive being isolated in a dome together. From a MoBE perspective, it would be cool to study this system. It’s completely closed to outside microbes – the people living in this dome have to …
I got this email a few days ago from Jed Fuhrman. He had sent it to a group of people working on mcirobial diversity and he encouraged people to share it. I asked and he approved posting it here and I thought it would be of interest. (The image above is from Lane et al. 1985 …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: “Fade to Grey” by Visage A new paper in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology touches upon some interesting viewpoints. The paper is called Dysbiotic drift: mental health, environmental grey space, and microbiota, and was written by Alan C Logan. And it’s Open Access, which we all appreciate! The article, which is rather …
Welcome to microBEnet News Summer 2013 MicroBEnet Blogs A brief summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net Each issue we give a brief summary of the topics discussed in our blog over the last month (3 months this time!). Be sure to check it out here. We started off the month with a …
Welcome to microBEnet News MicroBEnet Blogs A brief summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net Blog posts covered a wide range of topics: Moving public perception from abiotic to probiotic by Kyle Bibby Fungi on residential surfaces: sinks are sources, other surfaces are sinks by Rachel Adams Building science measurements in the Hospital …
MicroBEnet Blogs A summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net As usual, our blog posts this summer spanned a wide range of topics relevant to the microbiology of the built environment, ranging from concrete to germophobia. Announcements: Abstract Submission open for Healthy Buildings Europe 2015 Sloan Microbiology of the Built Environment Data Analysis Workshop …
Wow – this is really really cool: Hidden Life Forms: Investigating Microbial Diversity on Our Bodies and in Our Homes. The article is by Jennifer Cutraro and it goes through a series of course / learning activities regarding microbial diversity – of homes and of people. It has things like: a warm up activity a pre-activity …
One activity we have been hoping to do more of here at microBEnet is to catalyze the development and sharing and evaluation of course materials (preferably free and open) for teaching about microbiology of the built environment. I confess this is just not my area of expertise so I am going to be writing a …
Laura Williams recently posted a great writeup of some of the materials she covered with her microbiology class – specifically focused on microbes in the built environment. It turns out they were reading one of the papers we recently published (!) about how humans can influence the microbes indoors by the way we interact with …
Today, humans spend ~90% of their lives roaming the ‘great indoors’, which is very different from the outdoor environments where we co-evolved with our commensal microbiota (Kelley and Gilbert, 2013). We are just beginning to understand how the design of built environments (BEs) influences our microbiome, and how these interactions, in turn, might affect human …