Distillations magazine

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.

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

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

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

The good and bad of an everlasting invention.

To slow global warming scientists have tried schemes both simple and bizarre to bottle up cow burps.

Making eco-friendly cement is easy; the hard part comes later.

Why would anyone visit a radioactive ghost town or the remnants of a nuclear reactor?

Our histories of the infamous chemical often conflict with the facts.

Or will it speed the animal’s demise?

In the 1940s two chemists joined forces to fight Los Angeles’s stinky, stinging air.

How do we think about a world that doesn’t yet exist?

Was Svante Arrhenius the first climate change believer?

Take a trip down Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal with cartographer and citizen scientist Eymund Diegel.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita displaced more than a million people in 2005, many of whom turned to trailers provided by FEMA. But it soon became apparent that these trailers were making people sick.

Is recycled wastewater too much to swallow?

The fight for Brooklyn’s coolest Superfund site.

In the 1960s chemists created artificial turf. But are synthetic fields better than natural grass?