So a number of years ago our lab embarked on Project MERCCURI (let’s not talk about the tortured acronym). This complex and citizen science-based collaboration (website here) has been a fascinating journey. It’s ranged from getting to watch a rocket launch in Florida, to discovering/describing a new bacterial species, to our most recent publication… the …
Back in September 2014 I was invited to write a book chapter on citizen science in microbiology. After several iterations of the book, the chapter, and the licensing agreement here is the final version. The book came out yesterday, here’s a link to the entire book on Amazon (“The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science“) …
The Microbiology of the Built Environment Network (http://microBE.net – this website) has made it into the community page at PLoS Biology! Our article has been in the works for some time, and we’re now pleased to announce its official publication: Bik HM, Coil DA, Eisen JA (2014) microBEnet: Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community …
After over a year of collecting and screening hundreds of samples from the built environment we have just sent our collection of 48 “finalists” to Florida for the upcoming launch. Samples have come from all over the country including NFL/NBA/MBL games, sites of historic interest (e.g. the Liberty Bell), and a number of schools. These …
In researching previous studies conducted on microbes in space for Project MERCURRI, I ran across an interesting microbiology diversity study done on European Spacecraft-Associated (ESA) clean rooms in the Herschel Space Observatory. Historically, clean rooms are supposedly “sterile” environments that are used for the building and maintenance of spacecrafts, as directed by the UN’s Outer Space planetary …
I haven’t posted in awhile about Project MERCCURI but we’ve been plugging along preparing all of our candidate bacteria to fly to the space station. This process turned out to be much much more work that we anticipated. In the end we grew up many hundreds of strains from events around the country in order …
A nice little video featuring Jenna and Jonathan talking about Project MERCCURI:
The Today Show on NBC collected some built environment samples to send to space with Project MERCCURI this morning. Here’s the video of them swabbing the set and the primary camera. Very cool… Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Just a brief post here to point people to a blog post on the Science Cheerleader website which describes the efforts of our Project MERCCURI team to team up with Pop Warner to collect samples for the ISS, for the Earth Microbiome Project, and to expand the educational reach of this citizen science effort. Read …
So last night was the first large-scale public microbial sampling event for project MERCCURI (a.k.a. Microbes in Spaaaace!). Around 330 teachers from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) conference bought tickets to the game. After the game many of them came down on the court to take photos, shoot baskets and sample the microbes on …