Building a Building Science Social Media Collection

For the last few months I have been working on building up on microBEnet social media resources relating to “Building Sciences” and the “Built Environment.”  One aspect of this search has been to look for blogs that focus at least in part on “Building Sciences” or the “Built Environment.” This has been much more difficult than collecting …

AAAS Microbiomes of the Built Environment Symposium videos available on-line

Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …

The microbial aura of our pets

In Dirty Dog: Do Pets Track Bacteria in Your Home? on the Popular Science blog, science journalist Brooke Borel describes her recent experience contributing to the citizen science experiment called The Wild Life of Our Homes run by Rob Dunn and Holly Menninger at North Carolina State University. Here she presents a beautiful graphic depicting how the samples that …

Lessons learned: The microbes all around us and our buildings — and Jessica Green’s Nautilus article

Illustration (from OpenScar.com) an explanation of the beginning of the spread of SARS in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex where the index case was in a building 60 meters away from a building where about 45% of the 300 infected individuals at Amoy Gardens lived. Many of the other infected individuals also lived in …

Podcast hosts discussing Rachel Adams paper on fungal diversity in the built environment

One of my spare time activities is to listen to science-themed podcasts and for several years I’ve been following the “This week in Microbiology” and “This week in Virology” podcasts hosted by Vincent Racanielloand friends at Columbia University. During the podcast, the hosts usually discuss a couple papers of interest to them similar to a …

Put a microbe on it: “The Great Indoors” session at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting

“Indoors” appeared as a session title for the first time at the annual meeting of the Ecology Society of America after Brendan Bohannan of the BioBE Center at the University of Oregon and Tom Bruns of BIMERC at the University of California organized a session entitled “The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of …

NewScientist feature on Noah Fierer “Intrepid explorer of the microbe jungle in your home”

Nice mini feature on Noah Fierer in the the New Scientist: Intrepid explorer of the microbe jungle in your home The feature is basically an interview with Graham Lawton and covers many topics of interest to studies of “microbiology of the built environment.” Good stuff in there on natural history, germaphobia, toilets and more.  Definitely worth …