Distillations magazine
Politically Charged
How a shady car battery additive called AD‑X2 sparked a showdown between the U.S. political and scientific establishments.
Distillations articles reveal science’s powerful influence on our lives, past and present.
An Absolute Good?
Paul Berg, controversy, and the engineering of life.
The Comet Panic of 1910, Revisited
A recent discovery in a remote Puerto Rican cave sheds new light on the hysteria that greeted Halley’s Comet a century ago.
As Good as Gold
Why do we still study the color of urine?
Proxies for Justice
The climate history of tropical regions has been chronically understudied. Correcting the record will require new methods and new perspectives.
From the Front Line to the Freezer Aisle
How World War II changed the way we eat.
Picric Acid’s Volatile History
A mutable chemical and our collective choices.
What Doomed Central Park’s Dinosaurs?
Historians unmask the villain who killed off New York’s Paleozoic Museum.
Water and Power
Could a century-old aqueduct point the way to Los Angeles’s clean energy future?
We’re Going to Work Miracles
The failed promises of Project Plowshare.
A Tragedy with No End
Why does Garrett Hardin’s pessimistic fable haunt our collective imagination?
That Time Demons Possessed the Telegraph
Solar storms from long ago have become the delight of some scientists—and the dread of others.
21 Years, 7,600 Tests
Mary Papanicolaou, the woman behind the man behind the Pap smear.
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.
Joe Hin Tjio Counts Chromosomes
A basic scientific error hid in plain sight for decades until an Indonesian geneticist spent Christmas break on a lab bender.
Everyday Monsoons
Washes and other gaps in the Sonoran Desert.
The Dinosaurs Died in Spring
Science that ushered in a new epoch also revealed stunning details from Earth’s distant past.
Sylvia Earle and the Call of the Deep
Adventure and tangled interests under the sea.
Matchmaking in Colonial India
An inconspicuous technology sparks revolution on the subcontinent.