Distillations magazine

Unexpected Stories from Science’s Past

Environment & Nature

Our impact on the natural and built worlds

Photo of mattress with spraypainted warning
Environment & Nature

A Perfect Glutton, Never Ceasing

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

Environment & Nature

Ruth Patrick’s Lovely Creatures

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

Environment & Nature

How Two Outsider Scientists Saw Inside Climate Change

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

Environment & Nature

The Sun Queen and the Skeptic: Building the World’s First Solar Houses

In the mid-20th century, colleagues-turned-rivals Maria Telkes and Hoyt Hottel engineered new ways of heating American homes.

large crowd outside in city
Environment & Nature

Philadelphia Earth Week, Fifty Years On

The successes and shortcomings of the first Earth Day in 1970 still reverberate.

Two women standing on street dabbing their eyes
Environment & Nature

Smith Griswold Sells the War against Smog

To fight air pollution, officials first had to convince Californians that carmakers were the enemy, not cars.

Environment & Nature

Poison Pill: The Mysterious Die-Off of India’s Vultures

India’s vultures have been driven to the brink of extinction in a matter of decades. Their loss threatens the well-being of the country’s human population.

Environment & Nature

Where Lies Humanity’s Salvation—Conservation or Innovation?

Scientists William Vogt and Norman Borlaug took very different approaches to feeding the world.

Environment & Nature

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?

Environment & Nature

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.

Environment & Nature

The Folly of the Martian Back-Up Plan

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

letter from Eleanor Roosevelt
Environment & Nature

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.

Environment & Nature

If You Smell Something, Say Something

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

Environment & Nature

Styrofoam, a Practical and Problematic Creation

The good and bad of an everlasting invention.

Environment & Nature

Tummy Trouble

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

Environment & Nature

Concrete Solutions

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

Environment & Nature

Greetings from Isotopia

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

Environment & Nature

Beyond Silent Spring: An Alternate History of DDT

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