The NAS report on Microbiomes of the Built Environment is getting some reasonably broad reach. For example it was picked up by the American Industrial Hygiene Association. See: Report Suggests Research Agenda for Indoor Microbiology, Human Health, and Buildings
I have been tracking #actuallivingscientist postings on Twitter compiled those by people doing microbiology. Actual living microbiologists. [View the story “These are actual living microbiologists #actuallivingscientist #microbiology #microbes #microBEnet” on Storify]
As Beijing experiences its first “Red Alert” smog emergency, an aptly-timed bit of quirky performance art is making the round on Chinese social media and the English-language press today. A artist from Shenzhen who calls himself “Brother Nut” spent 100 days walking around Beijing with an industrial vacuum cleaner. He then collected dust into a …
A blog post from the Scottish Wildlife Trust by Ed Taylor discusses the importance of greenspace in Scotland’s suburban and urban areas. It’s part of a “50 for the Future” series that suggests 50 things that should occur in Scotland over the next 50 years to benefit both people and wildlife. As suburban areas are …
For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …
Sometimes efforts to be environmentally friendly can give rise to microbial challenges. This was nicely described by Katie Dahlhausen in her recent post about water quality about green buildings. Other examples include observations that Legionella pneumophila can be contracted from shower heads and the use of low flow shower heads and lower water temperatures may increase its transmission. Likewise, wastewater (e.g., Environmental and …
As some QIIME users may be aware, we’re starting to think about our transition from QIIME 1 to QIIME 2. We want to briefly share our thoughts about this transition so the QIIME user community has an idea of what to expect as we start this process. See our post, Toward QIIME 2, on the QIIME …
Happy 4th of July! Given how many people in the US are travelling this long weekend, this article about air quality on airplanes caught my eye. And, while you are reading this post, may I suggest the following song: B.o.B – Airplanes ft. Hayley Williams of Paramore ? In this short article called Air Quality on …
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 …
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 …