There is a new open access paper of possible interest to those working on water systems, green buildings, and/or microbial ecology: Survey of green building water systems reveals elevated water age and water quality concerns – Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology (RSC Publishing) DOI:10.1039/C5EW00221D By William J. Rhoads, Amy Pruden and Marc A. Edwards in Environmental …
California may be in drought, but the ideas keep flowing about different ways to conserve water in green buildings. Only recently have scientists began to truly understand how these obvious benefits to the environment may be adversely affecting human health. In a paper published in Environmental Science Water Research & Technology, researchers have aimed to …
Just a quick conference announcement here for “Human Connection: the Roles of Materials, Human Performance, and Research Translation in Health-Centered Buildings” sponsored by the US Green Building council to be held in Bethesda MD on November 10th. Information from the website below: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Health in Buildings Roundtable (HiBR), U.S. Green …
Just a quick post to highlight the upcoming Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in New Orleans, Oct 22-24. Here’s the slightly over the top pitch from the organizers: Greenbuild is the premier event for sustainable building. Featuring three exhilarating days of uplifting speakers, unmatched networking opportunities, showcases, LEED workshops and tours of green buildings in New …
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 …
Heard a very interesting story on NewsHour yesterday about portable classrooms: The story is reported by Katie Campbell of KCTS in Seattle. Some of the issues discussed in the context of “reinventing” portable classrooms include carbon dioxide monitoring, sustainability and the Living Building Standards, using solar for electricity, natural ventilation instead of noisy HVAC units, …
Many recent microbe.net post links to “blog of the day” provide diverse, interesting reading related to microbial ecology. To identify some worthwhile “building science” blogs, we contacted some of the most knowledgeable building scientists we know. The results suggest some observations comparing building science and microbial ecology. Both domains (“fields,” “disciplines”) are highly diversified, ranging …
During Indoor Air 2011 there was a lot of buzz about this report which came out halfway through the meeting. The full title is “Climate Change, the Indoor Environment, and Health (2011)”. This 246-page report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Acadamies goes into great detail about the various ways that climate change …