Exploring the Hidden Life in the Air around Us with Carl Zimmer

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

Scientists now agree that COVID spreads via airborne transmission. But during the early days of the disease, public health officials suggested that it mainly did so via close contact. The subsequent back-and-forth over how COVID spread brought science journalist Carl Zimmer into the world of aerobiology. In his new book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, Zimmer examines the unseen life in the air around us. He joins host Rachel Feltman to look back at the history of the field, from ancient Greek “miasmas” to Louis Pasteur’s unorthodox experiments to biological warfare. You can preorder Zimmer’s new book And stay up-to-date on his work at his website E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Naeem Amarsy with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:27.9	slash UK slash AI for people. For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Theltenman.
0:41.3	You probably don't spend too much time thinking about the air you breathe, at least relative
0:46.3	to the amount of time you spend actually breathing it, which, unless you do a lot of free diving,
0:50.8	should be pretty much always.
0:53.4	But there's a whole lot going on in every inhalation and exhalation.
0:58.0	Here to tell us more is science journalist Carl Zimmer.
1:01.0	He's the author of a new book called Airborne,
1:04.0	The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe.
1:12.7	Thanks so much for coming on to chat today, Carl.
1:15.3	Thanks for having me.
1:16.4	Let's start with an overview of the book.
1:18.6	Would you tell us a little bit about it?
1:20.8	When I was reporting on the COVID pandemic at the New York Times, like a lot of my colleagues,
1:27.1	one of the most puzzling things about it
1:29.2	was that there was this long-drawn-out argument about how COVID spread. And the consensus now is
1:38.1	that COVID is airborne. But at the time, there was a lot of back and forth about that. And it seemed to me,
1:45.3	like to other reporters, this shouldn't be that hard to figure out, wondering about that and talking to scientists
1:51.8	about just why this was such a fraught subject took me down a long history in a field that's
2:00.0	known as aerobiology, in other words, the life of the
2:02.3	air. And I realized that the answer to this question is actually one that goes back centuries
	...

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