Conference announcement: The 7th Conference on Beneficial Microbes will be held at UW-Madison on July 8-11, 2018. The abstract submission deadline is May 2. https://uwmadison.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/BENEFICIALMICROBES/18 The conference was formerly the “ASM Conference on Beneficial Microbes,” with a long history of combining model and natural systems to understand the ecology and functions of host-associated microbes. When ASM …
I just stumbled across a NY Times article about a children’s book by Nicola Davies by the title Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes. The article and the quotes from the book make me both excited and optimistic for how microbes are portrayed. A huge problem I have found in talking to non-microbiologists about microbiology is …
Part of our ongoing mission is to get people to look beyond pathogens, to consider the microbiome as a whole (indoors or human), and to not assume all microbes are evil. I was particularly struck yesterday by an article on a “water-less shower” product being hyped on SmartPlanet. Especially this quote: “Though some of you …
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 …
