I remember when I first learned that human beings had microbial clouds hovering in the air around them at all times. I’d been sitting at my desk on the fifth floor of a corporate building in lower Manhattan for five hours when the data scientist James Meadow told me I’d probably shed millions of microbes all over my cubicle that day. “You know the dirty kid from Peanuts? Pig-Pen? It turns out we all look like that,” Meadow said into the phone.
