This week’s papers are about microbes found on hospital doorknobs, spacecraft assembly cleanrooms, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, in waste water, and in creosote-treated wood composting. I could not find a song about the specific painting featured here, but Panic at the Disco had a song about another famous painting by LdV: The Ballad of Mona …
Many of us are familiar with the story of the wolves in Yellowstone that scare away hungry elk herds from tasty young willows (although the ecology of Yellowstone is probably more complicated than that). Nonetheless many ecologists are keenly interested in what has been termed the ecology of fear in communities of plants, birds and mammals. The ecology of fear describes the role of …
Like the cement-producing bacteria, this falls under the category of “using microbes to construct the built environment.” Projects like these have no bearing on the natural microbial ecology of structures, but still go to show that the relationship between humans, microbes,and the built environment is complex and can take many forms. In this work, researchers …