Distillations magazine

Can a White House conference muster the political will needed to address the nation’s food insecurity and obesity crises? A summit from 1969 offers clues.

The pirate-turned-naturalist-turned-pirate-again inspired generations of British writers and scientists.

Biologist John Calhoun’s rodent experiments gripped a society consumed by fears of overpopulation.

Alternative currencies flourish in desperate times and situations.

Nuclear waste remains dangerous for millennia, so how do we keep people in the distant future away from it?

A centuries-old sailor’s hack enters the ecologist’s toolkit.

Calculating the automobile’s grisly impact on wildlife.

In showing that cholera spreads through tainted water, an English doctor helped lay epidemiology’s foundations.

Space toilets and the lessons of living in closed environments.

How ancient (and not so ancient) cultures thought about water purity and contamination.

A harrowing eye surgery may have given the impressionist painter the ability to see UV light.

A reclusive expert of 19th-century photography laid the foundation for green chemistry solutions emerging today.

With their creeping, bloodsucking ways, bedbugs continue to mock human superiority.

The groundbreaking ecologist showed that the biological diversity within a stream can be used to diagnose its health.

The tricks and tools book sleuths use to date the undated.

Could a Soviet-era therapy offer a new defense against antibiotic-resistant superbugs?

How an obsession with crustaceans guided the naturalist toward his most consequential insights.

Eunice Foote and Guy Callendar showed the warming effects of CO₂ in the atmosphere.