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.

Read

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

Picture of shipping containers
Inventions & Discoveries

Armageddon’s Fingerprints

Around the world a network of detectives searches for evidence of illicit nuclear activity. Is it enough to keep us safe from a nuclear catastrophe?

head louse holding hair strands
Inventions & Discoveries

The Parasites in Our Past

Lice can tell us a lot about who we are and where we came from.

Environment

Harry versus the Volcano

Foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking eccentric Harry R. Truman became a folk hero for refusing to evacuate his home in the months before Mount St. Helens erupted. Where did he go once it did?

People & Politics

Baking Up a Storm

When crime and politics influenced American baking habits.

Health & Medicine

Exhuming the Flu

Remembering the Spanish flu 100 years later.

Environment

Nor Any Drop to Drink

Drought drove American pursuit of desalination in the mid-20th century. Now a changing climate has compelled nations around the world to embrace the double-eged technology.

Arts & Culture

Saving Old Movies

Old films are fragile, flammable, and frequently lost.

People & Politics

Through the Lens of Disability

What possibilities might we be ignoring when we unquestioningly privilege sight as the primary pathway to knowledge about the natural world?

Early Science & Alchemy

Snakes and Letters

An ancient work on toxicology gets a 16th-century makeover from a master of fonts.

Environment

The Folly of the Martian Back-Up Plan

Why resources spent building a colony on the red planet would be a waste of money.

Health & Medicine

Probing the Mysteries of Human Digestion

The strange, sometimes sickening things we’ve done to understand what goes on inside our guts.

Health & Medicine

Opioids’ Devastating Return

The latest painkiller revival has left a trail of bodies, with no end in sight.

letter from Eleanor Roosevelt
Environment

Water Fit for a King

Eleanor Roosevelt thanks a chemical engineering firm in Philadelphia for manufacturing water for the king and queen of England on their visit to America.

Inventions & Discoveries

Gone to the Dogs

A long-running genetics project in Siberia helps us understand how we made man’s best friend.

Inventions & Discoveries

Constructing Life

A historian of science goes searching for meaning in synthetic life.

Environment

If You Smell Something, Say Something

City dwellers of the 19th century were dogged by a foul terror: miasma.

Environment

Styrofoam, a Practical and Problematic Creation

The good and bad of an everlasting invention.

penicillin vessel
Health & Medicine

Old Brew, New Brew

Fermentation is the key to many of the lifesaving drugs we have today.