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Carl Zimmer’s new book sounds fascinating & relevant: Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. “The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down.”

Discussion  1 comment

Jason KottkeMOD

You can also pre-order Air-Borne on Bookshop.

And Zimmer wrote a bit about the book for his newsletter:

Its characters include some of the great figures of science, such as Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin, along famous figures like Charles Lindbergh. It also includes pioneers who tried to establish aerobiology as a science, only to slide into obscurity. In the book, I also look at how aerobiology has played a role in pivotal moments in history, from the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago to the Great Famine of Ireland to the Iraq War. Even as public health experts dismissed the threat of airborne diseases, American and Soviet scientists secretly used aerobiology to create huge arsenals of biological weapons, from anthrax bombs to balloons filled with wheat-killing spores.

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