Distillations magazine

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?

The origins and unintended consequences of U.S. forest-fighting policy.

Through attempts to weaponize Earth itself, Cold War researchers unintentionally created a new understanding of a fragile planet.

Nearly a century of asbestos manufacturing carried the borough of Ambler, Pennsylvania, from bust to boom and back to bust. In recent years Ambler has gotten back on its feet, but its industrial past remains very much present.

The technology to scrub noxious gases from car exhausts has existed since the 1950s. Why did the U.S. government wait until the 1970s to mandate its use?

Three atmospheric scientists describe carrying their work beyond the lab.

How did the Hanford nuclear facility become one of America’s most vexing environmental challenges? Jennifer Weeks explores the history and future of the site.

The largest accidental release of radioactivity in the United States did not occur in 1979 at Three-Mile Island. That very same year a collapsing dam released a flood of radioactive debris into the Navajo Nation.