Distillations magazine

Unexpected Stories from Science’s Past

Controversy, Control, and Cosmetics in Early Modern Italy

In a society that damned women for both plainness and adornment, wearing makeup became a defiant act of survival.

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Distillations articles reveal science’s powerful influence on our lives, past and present.

Health & Medicine

Old Drug Ketamine Offers New Hope for Chronic Pain Sufferers

Will stigma and cost undermine the therapy’s promise?

Engraved portrait of man
Early Science & Alchemy

Paracelsus, the Alchemist Who Wed Medicine to Magic

Historian Bruce Moran reveals the life of an itinerant doctor whose work influenced modern science.

Inventions & Discoveries

The Rise and Fall of Polywater

What happens when an earth-shattering discovery runs up against the scientifically impossible?

Color anatomical drawing of a mosquito
Health & Medicine

Our Oldest, Deadliest Foe

Tracing the immense misery wreaked by the mosquito.

Early Science & Alchemy

The Anatomy Riot of 1788

When New York’s poor revolted against the city’s grave-robbing medical establishment.

Color map of Soviet- and Western-controlled countries
People & Politics

Spying in Plain Sight: Scientific Diplomacy during the Cold War

The covert politics behind American efforts to establish scientific freedom around the world.

Color photograph of a mushroom cloud
Inventions & Discoveries

Element Hunting in a Nuclear Storm

A fighter pilot’s tragic flight into a nuclear explosion leads to the discovery of two elements.

People & Politics

Choosing a Better High-Tech Future

Rare earth elements make modern devices faster, brighter, and lighter, but it will take the creaky gears of government to make their production cleaner and more equitable.

Inventions & Discoveries

How RCA Fell Flat on Flat-Screen TVs

In the 1960s RCA created the world’s first liquid-crystal displays. How did the company fail to cash in on one of the modern world’s most ubiquitous technologies?

Health & Medicine

Searching for Schizophrenia

In the late 1960s an international contingent of psychiatrists took up a monumental task: making schizophrenia mean the same thing to doctors around the world.

Health & Medicine

Smallpox and the Long Road to Eradication

It’s one thing to make a scientific discovery, but making it count is another thing entirely.

People & Politics

The Transfermium Wars: Scientific Brawling and Name-Calling during the Cold War

The transfermium elements—the fleeting, lab-made substances that populate the end of the periodic table—have a history built on pride and acrimony.

Inventions & Discoveries

Marie Curie, Marie Meloney, and the Significance of a Gram of Radium

In the 1920s a pioneering journalist summoned the might of American women to revive a Nobelist’s career.

People & Politics

How the First American Science Writer Found (Then Lost) God in the Cosmic Ray

In the 1930s a pride- and faith-fueled dispute between two Nobel Prize–winning physicists spilled onto the front page of the New York Times.

Two women standing on street dabbing their eyes
Environment

Smith Griswold Sells the War against Smog

To fight air pollution, officials first had to convince Californians that carmakers were the enemy, not cars.

People & Politics

Hunting the Nazi Nuclear Hoard

In the last years of World War II a group of American scientists and soldiers raced to capture enemy physicists, sabotage Hitler’s nuclear ambitions, and do it all before their Soviet allies were any the wiser.

People & Politics

San Francisco’s Plague Years

As officials spread disinformation, a deadly epidemic edged its way into the United States.

Environment

Poison Pill: The Mysterious Die-Off of India’s Vultures

India’s vultures have been driven to the brink of extinction in a matter of decades. Their loss threatens the well-being of the country’s human population.