The Sloan Foundation recently convened grantees for the 2nd Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment, and the opening talk focused on the benefits of collaboration. Carlos Rodriguez reminded us (I’m paraphrasing), “When you look at problems in silos, you find solutions in silos. But when you look at problems across disciplines, you find …
Just kidding; I paid to get in, but this conference is not intended for a research architect/building scientist like me. This was my third ASM meeting, and now I know something approaching 1% of the jargon, so I was able to “mine” the sessions, especially the posters, for built-environment-relevant content. Under the surface of the …
In their just published paper in Environmental Science & Technology, “Tetracycline Resistance and Class 1 Integron Genes Associated with Indoor and Outdoor Aerosols,” Alison L. Ling, Norman R. Pace, Mark T. Hernandez, and Timothy M. LaPara have found that genes escape the indoor environment and can be found 2 km away. The abstract can be …
One of our broad goals at BIMERC, the UC Berkeley group funded by Sloan, is to look at what microbes are found indoors and why. We first tackled this in homes and decided to survey in a university family housing complex – in essence, getting replication in the built environment while eliminating potential sources of …
So here’s a question. Every couple of weeks I see articles about the wonderful benefits of having plants indoors. However, we’ve published in the past about how there’s little to no evidence that plants actually do anything meaningful in terms of indoor air quality (see here and here). The new rage seems to be biowalls… …
It sounds so nice and catchy. Priobiotics for buildings. We have written about it here are few times Probiotics for buildings in action? Interesting but can’t verify Probiotics for buildings: A potential future application of current work on microbes in buildings Though I have not found any published science behind this movement there is more …
Over the last few months we’ve acquired a few “draft” blog posts on various news items that never seemed to develop into full-fledged blog posts. Rather than let them suffer in silence, I thought I’d post them as a compilation: A story about finding low levels of MRSA in Chicago-area ambulances. Instead of the usual …
Well, normally I find popular press stories about getting rid of dust and bacteria to be mostly fear mongering. But this article from WebMD (which much of the time I have complaints about) actually seems worth a look: Are Vacuum Cleaners Bad for Your Health?. The article discusses in part new work from Australian researchers on …
Well, the winners of the first Google sponsored science fair have been announced” Lauren Hodge in the 13-14 year old group, Naomi Shah in the 15-16 year old group and Shree Bose, in the 17-18 age group. Time Magazine pointed out (see Sorry, Guys: Girls Sweep Googles First Ever Science Fair – Techland – TIME.com.) that …
Working on the microBEnet project has been a big learning experience for me because I really know next to nothing about the “Built Environment.” Part of my job as PI of the microBEnet is to start to help build interactions between microbiologists and building scientists. Fortunately, I have a building scientist as a collaborator on …