This week, a conversation with Carl Zimmer about his new book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Air-Borne is an epidemiological history of how we think about the air and its relationship to disease. For centuries, fear of airborne miasmas impacted the design of buildings and cities. While the underlying science of miasma theory was completely wrong, the focus on ventilation and clean air was actually ahead of its time.