ESBL and BioBE are thrilled to announce that Mark Fretz has joined the team as the new Associate Director of Outreach, based out of the Portland location at the University of Oregon. Mark brings a unique combination of experience in architecture and public health service, and will help further our goal of promoting health in …
Determining if life exists or ever existed beyond Earth is one of the most interesting scientific questions. Reports on numerous habitable planets have increased the speculations about potential extra-terrestrial life. However, these theoretically life-supporting planets are far beyond human’s reach – except Mars. In order to explore if there ever was life on Mars, the …
Microbes in the house Urban Dust Microbiome: Impact on Later Atopy and Wheezing – Christina Tischer – Environmental Health Perspectives (OA) Investigations in urban areas have just begun to explore how the indoor dust microbiome may affect the pathogenesis of asthma and allery. We aimed to investigate the early fungal and bacterial microbiome in house dust …
Recent papers about microbes and the built environment: Microbes in the house Fungal and Bacterial Communities in Indoor Dust Follow Different Environmental Determinants – Fabian Weikl – PLOS ONE (OA) (…) we wanted to identify key environmental determinants for the house dust microbiome from an existing collection of spatially (area of Munich, Germany) and temporally (301 days) distributed …
Happy Valentine’s Day! Here is a new post expressing my love for everything microbial and built. Based on real science and yes, there is chocolate. The great indoors Indoor microbial communities: Influence on asthma severity in atopic and nonatopic children – Karen C. Dannemiller – The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology ($$) We sought …
Happy Holidays! As I already noted on my MicrobiomeDigest blog, the stream of scientific papers does not seem to take a holiday break, so I will keep on posting new papers here. Clean sweep Potential association of vacuum cleaning frequency with an altered gut microbiota in pregnant women and their 2-year-old children — Ekaterina Avershina …
A new paper from Adams et al does a meta-analysis of indoor microbiome data to further characterize the microbial interactions within the indoor built environment. They used sequence data from four studies that covered South Korean homes, Colorado restroom surfaces, Colorado kitchen surfaces, and North Carolina homes, and found that communities were most similar between the type …
Just got sent this article (thanks Paula Olsiewski) “The Passive House in New York” which is an interesting article about the increasingly popular concept of passive houses. As the name suggests, passive houses maintain an appropriate ambient temperature without heating or cooling, mostly through airtights seals, a lot of insulation, and some sort of air exchange …
Wow – this is really really cool: Hidden Life Forms: Investigating Microbial Diversity on Our Bodies and in Our Homes. The article is by Jennifer Cutraro and it goes through a series of course / learning activities regarding microbial diversity – of homes and of people. It has things like: a warm up activity a pre-activity …
Well, I guess I do not really know what to think about this article by Jane Brody in the New York Times: Don’t Catch What Ails Your House Why do I not know what to think about this? Well I guess here are some of the things I am pondering: 1. The article gives the impression …