Distillations magazine

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

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?

When crime and politics influenced American baking habits.

Remembering the Spanish flu 100 years later.

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.

Old films are fragile, flammable, and frequently lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The good and bad of an everlasting invention.

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

A misunderstanding of hippo physiology gave rise to one of the most widespread and pointless practices in medical history.