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

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  For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.

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  You probably don't spend too much time thinking about the air you breathe,

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  at least relative to the amount of time you spend actually breathing it,

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  which, unless you do a lot of free diving, should be pretty much always.

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  But there's a whole lot going on in every inhalation and exhalation.

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  Here to tell us more is science journalist Carl Zimmer.

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  He's the author of a new book called the Hidden History of the Life We Breathe.

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  Thanks so much for coming on to chat today, Carl.

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  Thanks for having me.

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  Let's start with an overview of the book.

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  Would you tell us a little bit about it?

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  When I was reporting on the COVID pandemic at the New York Times, like a lot of my colleagues,

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  one of the most puzzling things about it was that there was this long,

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  drawn out argument about how Covid spread.

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  And the consensus now is that Covid's airborne.

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  But at the time, there was a lot of back and forth about that.

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  And it seemed to me like to other reporters, this shouldn't be that hard to figure out.

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  Wondering about that and talking to scientists about just why this was such a fraught subject took me down a long history in a field that's known as aerobiology,

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  in other words, the life of the air.

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  And I realized

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