Distillations magazine

During the War of 1870, astronomer Jules Janssen risked his life for scientific prestige and French patriotism.

Chemist Max Bredig’s race to save family and friends from catastrophe.

In the waning days of World War II, a psychiatrist raced across Germany to uncover the harrowing abuses of Nazi doctors.

After 150 years of scrutiny, scholars still misrepresent the British doctor’s life and gender.

A recent collection showcases the famous and not-so-famous women who have left their mark on the periodic table.

After transforming the periodic table should the promising young scientist have been allowed to fight in World War I?

The covert politics behind American efforts to establish scientific freedom around the world.

Rare earth elements make modern devices faster, brighter, and lighter, but it will take the creaky gears of government to make their production cleaner and more equitable.

The transfermium elements—the fleeting, lab-made substances that populate the end of the periodic table—have a history built on pride and acrimony.

In the 1930s a pride- and faith-fueled dispute between two Nobel Prize–winning physicists spilled onto the front page of the New York Times.

In the last years of World War II a group of American scientists and soldiers raced to capture enemy physicists, sabotage Hitler’s nuclear ambitions, and do it all before their Soviet allies were any the wiser.

As officials spread disinformation, a deadly epidemic edged its way into the United States.

Science writer Deborah Blum chronicles one chemist’s fight to bring order to a lawless food industry.

A lesson in humility begets a scientific revolution.

Movies and television shows like to portray scientists as lone geniuses. But scientists with disabilities know the reality is much more complex.

How did a Philadelphia chemist wind up a Soviet spy?

For centuries women have been looking at the stars despite earthly obstacles.

Why emphasizing intellectual achievement and scientific “genius” harms scientists with intellectual disabilities—and the rest of us.