You can download the database of over 360 publications that report characteristics of the indoor environment along with the microbes found in the studies. Each publication is entered as a record and includes citation, abstract, keywords, organisms, substrates, and environmental conditions as reported by the authors. The database in MS Access format is searchable for …
Great two-part interview with Rich Corsi from UT Austin talking about indoor air quality. If you’re the kind of person who stays in your house because you’re worried about the air quality outside… don’t listen to this interview because then you’ll have nowhere left to hide. First segment (starts at 9 minutes, 40 seconds) Second …
A just-published article by Desroches et al, “Extrolites of Wallemia sebi, a very common fungus in the built environment,”in the journal Indoor Air describes a previously unidentified metabolite of Wallemia sebi , a very common fungus in houses worldwide, although relatively more common in north temperate climates. The authors (including David Miller) write that it …
I was recently encouraged to post this video I made with a couple of classmates while I was in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin (the other “actors” are Laura Reed, now a PhD student in water resources at Tufts University, and Sarah Taylor Lange, who just finished her PhD in concrete …
Studies looking at the microbiology of the built environment find a lot of diversity. Sometimes it seems like anywhere you look for your target critter, you can find it. More and more these expeditions rely on sequencing DNA, which can detect all kinds of cells: in addition to ones that are living or dormant, PCR …
Italian architect Carlo Ratti, Director of the MIT SENSEable Cities Lab, presents an entertaining Ted Talk “Architecture that senses and responds” on the use of sensors in buildings to monitor occupant behavior and environmental conditions for input to the management of the buildings and other human-made systems. Once we know the critical environmental variables that …
Indoor Air and Climate Change URL: http://www.epa.gov/ncer/rfa/2014/2014_star_indoor_air.html Open Date: 10/23/2013 – Close Date: 01/23/2014 Here are some of the important details: Summary: EPA announces an extramural funding competition designed to support research that improves understanding of how climate change affects human health through indoor air quality as adapted by building designs and uses. Proposals should …
Bill Nazaroff has a seemingly simple – but quite detailed and very useful article worth reading for anyone interested in indoor air / indoor environments. It was published September 13 in Indoor Air: Four principles for achieving good indoor air quality. In the paper Nazaroff first discusses how “Everything should be made as simple as possible, …
We’ve recently received an award from the Sloan Foundation to examine the mycobiota from paired house dust and infant fecal samples collected in the first year of life. The main purpose of the study is to examine how the immediate environment (house dust) may shape the gut mycobiota of infants and affect immune activation and …
Checking out this new paper from Rachel Adams, Anthony Amend, John Taylor and Thomas Bruns: A Unique Signal Distorts the Perception of Species Richness and Composition in High-Throughput Sequencing Surveys of Microbial Communities: a Case Study of Fungi in Indoor Dust – Online First – Springer. It is open access so anyone out there can get …