Carl Zimmer

She's an atmospheric scientist.

And she's at Virginia Tech, and she and her husband are trying to juggle their jobs and raising a little kid.

And their son is constantly coming home from daycare because he's constantly getting sick, or there's a bunch of kids who are sick there and so on.

And that got Lindsay Moore actually really curious, like,

What's going on?

Because they were being careful about like washing objects and so on and doing their best to keep the kids healthy.

And she started like looking into ideas about transmission of diseases.

And she got very interested in the flu because in 2009, there was a new pandemic.

In other words, that you had this new strain of influenza surging throughout the world.

She said, well, let me look at what people are saying.

As soon as she started looking at it, she just said, well, people are saying things that, as a physicist, I know make no sense.

They're saying that droplets bigger than five microns just plummet to the ground.

In a way, that was part of a general rejection of airborne transmission.

And she said, look, I mean, I teach this like every year.

I just go to the blackboard and derive a formula to show that particles much bigger than this can stay airborne.

So there's something really wrong here.

And she started spending more and more time studying airborne disease.

And she kept seeing the wells as being cited.

And she was like, who are these?

She didn't know who they were.