With the recent popularity of “green” buildings, we have to wonder how these new materials affect the microbes in the built environment. This 2010 paper from researchers at the University of Texas examines fungal growth in such materials. The study involved artificially and naturally inoculating four green building materials and their non-green counterparts with Aspergillus niger, as well as …
“Susceptibility of green and conventional building materials to microbial growth” Indoor Air journal, accepted for publication Abstract Green building materials are becoming more popular. However, little is known about their ability to support or limit microbial growth. The growth of fungi was evaluated on five building materials. Two green, two conventional building materials and wood …
The Microbiology of the Built Environment Network (http://microBE.net – this website) has made it into the community page at PLoS Biology! Our article has been in the works for some time, and we’re now pleased to announce its official publication: Bik HM, Coil DA, Eisen JA (2014) microBEnet: Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community …
For the last few months I have been working on building up on microBEnet social media resources relating to “Building Sciences” and the “Built Environment.” One aspect of this search has been to look for blogs that focus at least in part on “Building Sciences” or the “Built Environment.” This has been much more difficult than collecting …
With a URL asking “is this the most important building in the country?”, I had to check this one out. This article from SmartPlanet describe the “Facility for Low Energy Experiments (FLEXLab)”, housed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in CA. Basically it’s a fancy building that allows designers, architects, builders and others to test various …
There is a new blog post from the Department of Energy pointing to a resource that may be of use: White House Highlights Two Energy-Slashing, Open Data Initiatives | Department of Energy. This post highlights two steps featured in the “Energy Datapalooza” activity going on now: KEY BUILDING TECHNOLOGIES OFFICE STEPS INCLUDE: – Anonymized building …
I know it is a bit late but I just discovered this story about how May has been declared “Building Safety Month” in Tennessee: Governor Haslam Proclaims May as Building Safety Month. This appears to be mostly a public awareness campaign but hopefully it will (or has) gotten people in Tennessee to think about “Building science” …
Good to see builders putting money into the academic side of building science: Home builder donates $10 million to U of A to make construction greener. Not sure if this builder has a good or a bad or a middle of the road track record in any way but 10 million dollars to help start the …
Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …
Not actually Danish chickens. (cc-by-nc river seal)One of the most coveted chores at my high school was to feed our school’s chickens. The chickens provided eggs for the students, faculty, staff and our extensive Meals on Wheels program. I always thought it was the best chore assignment you could ask for; the hen house had …