
Air-Borne
The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
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Narrated by:
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Joe Ochman
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By:
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Carl Zimmer
About this listen
The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down
Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the COVID pandemic was caused by an airborne virus.
In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We travel to the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, and follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity.
Air-Borne chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox, and an array of other pathogens. Air-Borne also leaves listeners looking at the world with new eyes—as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind.
Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on COVID and other threats to global health, Air-Borne surprises us as it reveals the hidden world of the air.
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Critic reviews
"What is in the air we breathe? That is the question Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times science writer, sets out to answer in this brisk, lyrical tour of aerobiology — from germ warfare and the identification of airborne viruses to the proliferation of Covid and lifesaving discoveries that lend color and shape to the invisible." —The New York Times
"Another brilliant work from one of the very best science writers, Air-Borne will leave you agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us, and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late. It is a book about how much there is still left to know, and how frustrating it can be to turn knowledge into wisdom." —Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World
“With exhaustive detail and impressive breadth, Zimmer chronicles the multigenerational comeback of a nearly lost science.” —Scientific American
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Story
Riley Black brings us back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home. As the chapters move upwards in time, Black guides listeners along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.
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No argument
- By Anonymous User on 05-20-25
By: Riley Black
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Ends of the Earth
- Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future
- By: Neil Shubin
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He’s survived polar storms, traveled in temperatures that can freeze flesh in seconds, and worked hundreds of miles from the nearest humans, all to deepen our understanding of our world. Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Ends of the Earth blends travel writing, science, and history in a book brimming with surprising and wonderful discoveries.
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Excellent scientific view of the poles
- By Prosanta Chakrabarty on 02-27-25
By: Neil Shubin
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The Genius of Birds
- By: Jennifer Ackerman
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ackerman
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds are astonishingly intelligent creatures. According to revolutionary new research, some birds rival primates and even humans in their remarkable forms of intelligence. In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores their newly discovered brilliance and how it came about. As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent.
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Well-researched and engaging
- By Rubin on 05-20-25
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Parasite Rex
- Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
- By: Carl Zimmer
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, parasites have lived in nightmares, horror stories, and the darkest shadows of science. In Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer takes listeners on a fantastic voyage into the secret universe of these extraordinary life forms that are not only among the most highly evolved on Earth, but make up the majority of life's diversity. Traveling from the steamy jungles of Costa Rica to the parasite-riddled war zone of southern Sudan, Zimmer introduces an array of amazing creatures that invade their hosts, prey on them from within, and control their behavior.
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Fascinating, Repetitive and reading disaster
- By Spiral, on 04-02-20
By: Carl Zimmer
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Booster Shots
- The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health
- By: Adam Ratner MD MPH
- Narrated by: Adam Ratner MD MPH
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Measles, once seemingly defeated, is resurgent around the globe. Why, at a time when biomedical science is so advanced, do parents turn away from vaccination, endangering their own children and the health of the wider population? Using a combination of patient narrative, historical analysis, and scientific research, Dr. Adam Ratner, pediatrician and infectious disease specialist, argues that the reawakening of measles and the subsequent coronavirus pandemic are bellwethers of forgotten knowledge—indicators of decaying trust in science and an underfunded public health infrastructure.
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A must listen
- By Frank Chervenak MD on 04-29-25
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American Sheep
- A Cultural History
- By: Brett Bannor
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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From the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century, America's flocks played a key role in the nation's development. Furthermore, much consternation centered around the sheep the United States lacked, so that dependency on foreign wool became a full-blown crisis in wartime. But more than just providers of wool, sheep were valued for their meat, for their byproducts after slaughter, and even for their efficiency at lawn maintenance.
By: Brett Bannor
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T. Rex and the Crater of Doom
- Princeton Science Library
- By: Walter Alvarez, Carl Zimmer - foreword
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? Walter Alvarez, one of the Berkeley scientists who discovered evidence of the impact, tells the story behind the development of the initially controversial theory. It is a saga of high adventure in remote locations, of arduous data collection and intellectual struggle, of long periods of frustration ended by sudden breakthroughs, of friendships made and lost, and of the exhilaration of discovery that forever altered our understanding of Earth's geological history.
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Fascinating book!
- By ryan moore on 08-21-20
By: Walter Alvarez, and others
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American Poison
- A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice
- By: Daniel Stone
- Narrated by: Daniel Stone
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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At noon on October 27, 1924, a factory worker was admitted to a hospital in New York City, suffering from hallucinations and convulsions. Before breakfast the next day, he was dead. Alice Hamilton was determined to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. By the time of the accident, Hamilton had pioneered the field of industrial medicine in the United States. She specialized in workplace safety years before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created. But this time, she was up against a formidable new foe: America’s relentless push for progress, regardless of the cost.
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Great storytelling
- By Lera on 04-10-25
By: Daniel Stone
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Waste Wars
- The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
- By: Alexander Clapp
- Narrated by: Greg Lockett
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.
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Great writer of awful reality
- By Tracie B. on 04-15-25
By: Alexander Clapp
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Banned Books
- The World's Most Controversial Books, Past, and Present
- By: DK
- Narrated by: Charles Armstrong
- Length: 3 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Banned Books explores why some of the world's most important literary classics and seminal non-fiction titles were once deemed too controversial for the public—whether for challenging racial or sexual norms, satirizing public figures, or simply being deemed unfit for young audiences. From the banning of All Quiet on the Western Front and the repeated suppression of On the Origin of the Species, to the uproar provoked by Lady Chatterley's Lover, entries offer a fascinating chronological account of censorship.
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Important topic
- By Nick on 04-16-24
By: DK
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The Milky Way
- An Autobiography of Our Galaxy
- By: Moiya McTier
- Narrated by: Moiya McTier
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching one hundred billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, of feeling unbelievably lonely, and of hearing its own story told by others, The Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All one hundred billion stars and fifty undecillion tons of gas of it. It all began some thirteen billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma just could not keep their metaphorical hands off each other.
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Disappointed
- By Erin Eagles on 09-03-22
By: Moiya McTier
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Close to Home
- The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door
- By: Thor Hanson
- Narrated by: Stacy Carolan
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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We all live on nature’s doorstep, but we often overlook it. From backyards to local parks, the natural places we see the most may well be the ones we know the least. In Close to Home, biologist Thor Hanson shows how retraining our eyes reveals hidden wonders just waiting to be discovered. Close to Home is a hands-on natural history for any local patch of Earth. It shows that we each can contribute to science and improve the health of our planet. And even more, it proves that the wonders of nature don’t lie in some far-off land: they await us, close to home.
By: Thor Hanson
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No Less Strange or Wonderful
- Essays in Curiosity
- By: A. Kendra Greene
- Narrated by: A. Kendra Greene
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation—on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look. In twenty-six sparkling essays, Greene is trying to make sense—of anything, really—but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness.
By: A. Kendra Greene
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Infectious
- Pathogens and How We Fight Them
- By: John Tregoning
- Narrated by: Mike Cooper
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The subject of infection and how to fight it grows more urgent every day. How do pathogens cause disease? And what tools can we give our bodies to do battle? Dr. John S. Tregoning has dedicated his career to answering these questions. Infectious uncovers fascinating success stories in immunology and virology, making this book not only a vital overview of infection but also a hopeful history of human ingenuity.
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Infectious
- By Amazon Customer on 07-13-23
By: John Tregoning
When covid started I remember hearing about how mask couldn't really help with containment. This would later become a kind of conspiracy theory. That medical community was lying to
the general public to keep the good masks from themselves. I remember hearing how the mask just wouldn't work to stop the spread very. Still when I would hear about the reasons it was confusing to me. Mostly because, as a lay person, I didn't understand what airborne meant in turns of a contagion. I think it was very confusing to the public to tease apart what was meant by the terms. This book will clear up what it means and why the science establishment was so resistant to the idea that covid was an airborne spreader. He doesn't get into the philosophy of science with your paradigm shifts or falsifiability; but does give concise history of how science figured out how disease spread through the air. Can't recommend this book enough.
Very clarifying look at how messy science can be
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Excellent and timely!
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Interesting
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Accurate in an age of misinformation
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good book but could be a bit shorter
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