The following is the Executive Summary of a report on the AAAS “Microbiomes of the Built Environment Symposium”, March 27th, 2014, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The full report can be found here. The research field of Microbiomes of the Built Environment (MoBE) is relatively new, evolving about ten years ago from …
Just pointed to this story: Microbial stowaways to Mars identified : Nature News & Comment by Darlene Cavalier, our collaborator on the “Space Microbes” Project MERCCURI. The article reports on a presentation by Stephanie Smith at the ASM 2014 meeting going on in Boston. Smith presented results from characterizing (via culturing) the microbes present on various parts …
(The following information is taken from the full RFP which is attached here) The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announces a funding opportunity in its Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) program. The Foundation seeks to further the development of talented early stage Ph.D. scientists and engineers through the Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) Postdoctoral …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Capacitive Sensing with Arduino and Bare Conductive Paint SPACE, London, UK 10 May 2014, 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm Link to Web
Beginning Arduino SPACE, London, UK This workshop is over 3 Tuesday evenings, 22 & 29 April & 6 May, from 7pm to 9:30pm. Link to event: http://codasign.com/events/beginning-arduino2014-04-22/
Tomorrow all day there will be a meeting at AAAS HQ on “Microbiomes of the Built Environment“. I will be speaking at the meeting, and this is one of my major research areas, so I am a bit biased, but the meeting is going to be great I think. And it will be webcast live. …
You could say that I’m milking this one study design – one in which we surveyed the airborne microbial communities and surfaces around different units of a university housing complex – and you’d be right. But for good reason: it’s a powerful study design. We have replication of residential units of a common design across …