Distillations magazine

Unexpected Stories from Science’s Past

The Ingenious Arctic Cooking Pot

Rediscovering the clever chemistry behind a ceramic tradition that had all but vanished.

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Distillations articles reveal science’s powerful influence on our lives, past and present.

People & Politics

The Dual Legacies of Henry Moseley

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

Health & Medicine

Who Needs a Mammogram?

In the fight against breast cancer, entrenched interests and outmoded ideas may be hurting patients.

Health & Medicine

Medicinal Leeches and Where to Find Them

The rise, fall, and resurrection of the humble leech.

Health & Medicine

Old Drug Ketamine Offers New Hope for Chronic Pain Sufferers

Will stigma and cost undermine the therapy’s promise?

Engraved portrait of man
Early Science & Alchemy

Paracelsus, the Alchemist Who Wed Medicine to Magic

Historian Bruce Moran reveals the life of an itinerant doctor whose work influenced modern science.

Inventions & Discoveries

The Rise and Fall of Polywater

What happens when an earth-shattering discovery runs up against the scientifically impossible?

Color anatomical drawing of a mosquito
Health & Medicine

Our Oldest, Deadliest Foe

Tracing the immense misery wreaked by the mosquito.

Early Science & Alchemy

The Anatomy Riot of 1788

When New York’s poor revolted against the city’s grave-robbing medical establishment.

Color map of Soviet- and Western-controlled countries
People & Politics

Spying in Plain Sight: Scientific Diplomacy during the Cold War

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

Color photograph of a mushroom cloud
Inventions & Discoveries

Element Hunting in a Nuclear Storm

A fighter pilot’s tragic flight into a nuclear explosion leads to the discovery of two elements.

gold and silver globe and horse
Early Science & Alchemy

How Renaissance Princes Pursued Beauty in Science

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows how power and science were intertwined in early modern Europe.

People & Politics

Choosing a Better High-Tech Future

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.

Inventions & Discoveries

How RCA Fell Flat on Flat-Screen TVs

In the 1960s RCA created the world’s first liquid-crystal displays. How did the company fail to cash in on one of the modern world’s most ubiquitous technologies?

Health & Medicine

Searching for Schizophrenia

In the late 1960s an international contingent of psychiatrists took up a monumental task: making schizophrenia mean the same thing to doctors around the world.

Health & Medicine

Smallpox and the Long Road to Eradication

It’s one thing to make a scientific discovery, but making it count is another thing entirely.

People & Politics

The Transfermium Wars: Scientific Brawling and Name-Calling during the Cold War

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

Inventions & Discoveries

Marie Curie, Marie Meloney, and the Significance of a Gram of Radium

In the 1920s a pioneering journalist summoned the might of American women to revive a Nobelist’s career.

People & Politics

How the First American Science Writer Found (Then Lost) God in the Cosmic Ray

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.