A cloud of cloud things for detecting clouds

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 …

Indoor Air 2016: Call for Abstracts (Due October 15th)

(thanks to Paula Olsiewski for the reminder, text below from ISIAQ)   INDOOR AIR 2016   July 3-8th 2016, Ghent, Belgium Important dates: abstract submission closes: October 15th 2015 submission page abstracts acceptance notification:  December 1st 2015 extended abstract / full paper submission opens: December 1st 2015 extended abstract / full paper submission closes: February …

New papers on microbiology of the built environment, August 24, 2015

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 …

University of Oregon research on microbial communities in 72 homes

The University of Oregon published this announcement on AAAS’ EurekAlert: Oregon architecture researchers to study indoor air quality in 72 homes. So a good song to play while reading this post would be: “Portland, Oregon” ‌‌by Loretta Lynn & Jack White. The press release starts off with a short summary of this project: University of Oregon researchers and industry partners …

Breaking down human emissions

Microbiology of the Built Environment research these recent years have explored how humans are a source of microbes and microbial products indoors. To further study the effect of human occupancy on the biological aerosols of indoor space, our research group at Berkeley decided to move from observation studies to controlled experiments to isolate – and quantify – this …

Recent Built Environment Microbiology papers, July 6, 2015

Several new papers about microbes and the built environment came out or came up in my searches this weekend, so time for another installment. Since one of the papers is about prison workers, you could play Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues while reading this post. Open Access: Coccidioides Exposure and Coccidioidomycosis among Prison Employees, California, United States – …

Sensationalist headline from Time on Air Conditioning health risks, but OK story

Another quick post here.  There is a story by Markham Heid in Time of potential interest: You Asked: Is My Air Conditioner Killing Me? | TIME.  A bit sensationalist as a headline but has some good discussion and quotes in it including some interesting comments from Mark Mendell about indoor microbes.

Who are the bioaerosols in your neighborhood? Find out by entering a chamber … 

I know I am late to the game here but I am getting more and more fascinated by “chamber” studies in which people are placed in a sealed chamber and then emissions from those people (or from other things in the chamber with the people) are characterized.  With ever improving sensors, particle analysis tools, mass-specs …

Housing characteristics and microbial communities in homes of asthmatic children

Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Harder To Breathe – Maroon 5 Asthma severity can be affected by several indoor and outdoor conditions, including dust and microbes. In a paper that came out last week in Indoor Air, researchers from Yale University applied NextGen DNA sequencing to characterize the bacterial and fungal communities in house-dust sampled from …