Starting October 13, 2014, Eawag, (the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology), in collaboration with EPFL (the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), is offering a free online course Design and Planning of Sanitation Systems and Technologies. This free five-week course is managed by Coursera and begins on October 13. To participate, simply register online with your name and contact information. Five experts, led by Dr. Christoph Lüthi, will present in English with French subtitles. Several members of PHLUSH are taking this course; we would be interested in meeting other students on line.

Information and sign up here. www.coursera.org/course/sanitation

Another course entitled Gut Check: Exploring Your Microbiome offered by the University of Colorado started this week. As discussed elsewhere on the Forum, many of us consider the wildly diverse environment of our intestinal tract a topic related to sanitation. Says the course blurb: The human body harbors up to ten times as many microbial cells as human cells. What are these microbes and what are they doing? How can we study them to find out? What do they tell us about ourselves? Just as our human genome records traces of who we are and the conditions we have adapted to during evolutionary history, our microbial genomes may record traces of what we have eaten, where we have lived, and who we have been in contact with. The microbial ecosystems in different parts of our bodies, which differ radically from one another, also supply a wide range of functions that affect many aspects of human health.

Watch the video introduction and sign up here: www.coursera.org/course/microbiome