Distillations magazine
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.
Distillations articles reveal science’s powerful influence on our lives, past and present.
William Dampier, Revered and Reviled
The pirate-turned-naturalist-turned-pirate-again inspired generations of British writers and scientists.
Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?
Biologist John Calhoun’s rodent experiments gripped a society consumed by fears of overpopulation.
Greenbacks, Chits, and Scrip
Alternative currencies flourish in desperate times and situations.
Speaking to the Future
Nuclear waste remains dangerous for millennia, so how do we keep people in the distant future away from it?
The Simple Usefulness of the Secchi Disk
A centuries-old sailor’s hack enters the ecologist’s toolkit.
The Toll of the Road
Calculating the automobile’s grisly impact on wildlife.
John Snow Hunts the Blue Death
In showing that cholera spreads through tainted water, an English doctor helped lay epidemiology’s foundations.
Stuck Inside
Space toilets and the lessons of living in closed environments.
River Gods, Lake Monsters, and the Abiding Power of Myth
How ancient (and not so ancient) cultures thought about water purity and contamination.
Could Claude Monet See Like a Bee?
A harrowing eye surgery may have given the impressionist painter the ability to see UV light.
Matthew Carey Lea and the Origins of Mechanochemistry
A reclusive expert of 19th-century photography laid the foundation for green chemistry solutions emerging today.
A Perfect Glutton, Never Ceasing
With their creeping, bloodsucking ways, bedbugs continue to mock human superiority.
Ruth Patrick’s Lovely Creatures
The groundbreaking ecologist showed that the biological diversity within a stream can be used to diagnose its health.
Chasing the Clues in Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts
The tricks and tools book sleuths use to date the undated.
Bacteriophages and the Fight Against Cholera in Cold War Afghanistan
Could a Soviet-era therapy offer a new defense against antibiotic-resistant superbugs?
Darwin’s Barnacles
How an obsession with crustaceans guided the naturalist toward his most consequential insights.
How Two Outsider Scientists Saw Inside Climate Change
Eunice Foote and Guy Callendar showed the warming effects of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Fit to Be Dyed
The enduring appeal of tie-dye.