Distillations

Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov led an ideologically perilous campaign to rid the world of famine.

Crushing, smashing, and grinding for the sake of greener science.

This episode of The Disappearing Spoon explores how the daring heist of an anatomical wonder forever sullied the reputation of a great scientist.

An entomologist from Texas supposedly came up with ‘the single most original idea’ to eradicate screwworms. The Disappearing Spoon has the story.

Find out what a strange little sparrow can teach us about love, sex, and human biology in this episode of The Disappearing Spoon. 

Nuclear waste remains dangerous for millennia, so how do we keep people in the distant future away from it?

Calculating the automobile’s grisly impact on wildlife.

Space toilets and the lessons of living in closed environments.

How a steam-powered automobile in 1869 snuffed out the life of the brilliant naturalist and astronomer Mary Ward.

Scientists know how other animals’ bodies will change in warmer climates, but how will human beings respond?

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

Our approach to fighting wildfires is a fantasy—and it’s making them even more catastrophic.

How greed—and a group of Nazi prisoners—killed off one of the most iconic birds in American history: the ivory-billed woodpecker.

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

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

Remember the fire-fighting mascot Smokey Bear? Meet Johnny Horizon, his little-remembered, pollution-fighting counterpart.

The way the city tackled its water pollution problems has made it an unexpected pioneer.  

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

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.

Rare earth elements are essential to modern life. Luckily the world has plenty of them; unfortunately, getting them out of the ground leaves behind massive environmental damage.

The blaze that sparked the modern environmental movement . . . or did it?

Charles Mann’s latest book traces how scientists William Vogt and Norman Borlaug took very different approaches to feeding the world and how their feuding ideas anticipated today’s environmental debates.

Harnessing nature to deliver us from drought.

An archives collection at the Science History Institute gives a glimpse of Americans’ early efforts at desalination, a technology that nations around the globe have come to depend on.

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

The good and bad of an everlasting invention.

And how California’s car emission standards continue to influence the rest of the country.

It’s complicated.

An environmental success story.

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

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

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

As historian Elena Conis pursued a clearer understanding of one of the world’s most infamous chemicals, she discovered why our histories often conflict with the facts.

Or will it speed the animal’s demise?

Christy Schneider reflects on air pollution, health, and science.

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?

Take a trip down the Gowanus Canal with cartographer and citizen scientist Eymund Diegel.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have left hundreds of thousands of Americans homeless. Where will they live?

We loved it. We hated it. Now we kind of maybe like it again.

Is recycled wastewater too much to swallow?

The fight for Brooklyn’s coolest Superfund site.

Artificial turf was created to make people healthier, but is it doing more harm than good?

Sometimes the people in charge of keeping us safe know just enough to put us in even greater danger.

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.

Mother Nature can do a lot of damage. But what happens when humans are the ones creating these disasters?

Everything humans make eventually becomes trash. Considering its ubiquity, we don't think enough about what to do with our trash.

In February 2014, in the early hours of a cold Chicago morning, two men in a Jeep Liberty pulled up next to a parked minivan.

In the 1920s a mysterious scourge afflicted many city dwellers—newly washed laundry crumbling without explanation. Unmasking the culprit provided the first hint of a wider problem.

Communicating to scientists and communicating to the public require different skills. Three atmospheric scientists talk about how they go beyond the lab.

Doing science is usually expensive. Now a nonprofit is creating cheap do-it-yourself science kits for citizen scientists wanting to check on the health of their environment.

This week, more favorite segments from the past season. This episode is guaranteed to leave you well preserved.

On today’s show we go local when it comes to checking up on air quality. 

How did the Hanford nuclear facility become one of America’s most vexing environmental challenges?

On today’s show we look at how a couple different ecosystems are being impacted by changes to their water supplies.

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.

On today’s show we learn how advances in urban agriculture are providing new access to fresh food. 

Matthew Eisler reviews Scott L. Montgomery’s The Powers That Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond.

The chemistry of the universe may help explain the presence of life on Earth.

On today’s show we track the evolution of smog from symbol of industrial progress to public-health catastrophe.

Ahoy, mateys. Join us on the ocean floor. On today’s show we look at sunken ships.

This week we bring you some of our favorite segments from past Distillations episodes.

The genius of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring lay in pulling together already existing data from many areas and synthesizing it to create the first coherent account of the effects persistent chemicals had on the environment.

During the United Nations’ International Year of Chemistry (IYC 2011), students from around the world took part in water-testing experiments and created water-themed art.

This week, two stories of asbestos; once miracle product, now plague on the aging infrastructure to which it’s bound. 

On today’s episode we look at how environments recover after natural and manmade disasters.

Jody A. Roberts reviews Sandra Steingraber’s Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.

How did we get here and who else is out there? We explore the Big Bang Theory and find out how we’re greeting aliens.

Today’s show explores two very different ways people hope to protect future harvests.

Today’s show goes back in time to try to pinpoint what exactly the dinosaurs were like.

Part 4 of Our Chemical Landscape. This episode is about the wild, and how its species-in-residence use chemistry to communicate.

Part 3 of Our Chemical Landscape. This episode: how crop production has evolved in response to exploding global population growth.

Today the Distillations team delves into the weird and wonderful world of its favorite barnyard animal: the cow. 

Part 2 of Our Chemical Landscape. This episode: how suburb residents’ transportation needs have evolved in the past century.

During the 1860s and 1870s New York City experienced unprecedented growth. As the growing stench of tanneries and slaughterhouses mixed with that of garbage and sewage, citizens turned to the Board of Health, which dispatched chemist Charles Frederick Chandler to investigate.

Today Ari Daniel Shapiro takes us on a tour of the ocean.

One of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries was the controversial Gasland, in which money, science, and politics play a role in the development of natural-gas reserves in the eastern United States.

Part 1 of Our Chemical Landscape. Today’s episode: the city, and the role of energy in shaping its past and future.

Michal Meyer reviews James C. Whorton’s The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play.

In today’s episode we explore the consequences of our changing climate.

Ghosts of chemistry’s past, present, and future teach us about Greek fire, red sludge, and the future of the sun.

Episode 4 of Essential Elements. Today’s episode is about air and how the gases in it have been changing since Day 1.

Part 3 of Essential Elements. Today’s episode is about fire and how humans have tried to protect themselves from it.

Part 2 of Essential Elements. Today’s episode is about water and the many ways to ensure it is potable.

Part 1 of Essential Elements. Today’s episode is about earth and the Marcellus Shale.

Emily Pawley reviews Benjamin R. Cohen’s Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside.

This week we bring you some of our favorite segments from past Distillations episodes.

With dynamite and cannons, Robert St. George Dyrenforth hoped to end drought in the late 19th century. This vision of weather and climate control seized the imagination of scientists and businessmen.

This week: is there a way to tweak Earth's thermostat?

This week we’re digging into our archives and looking back at one of our first episodes of Distillations.

BASF had high hopes for its new biodegradable plastic, but success wasn’t simple.

What’s better than recycling? Reducing waste! OK, maybe not better, but equally important.

Autumn! Learn about leaf changes, the three sisters, and apple cider. Chemical Agent: Senescence.

Location, location, location! In this week’s episode we talk about why and how certain spaces are chosen and used.

We know that plants are living organisms, but rarely do we experience them as such. The images in this photo essay bridge the gap between human perception and plant life, showing plants as they move and grow.

Plants are not the silent, stationary creatures we imagine them to be. We look at plant growth and movement.

Love is in the air! Let’s learn how atoms find each other with an examination of chemical bonds. 

Space, the Final Frontier! There’s an entire field—astrochemistry—dedicated to understanding the chemistry of the universe. 

James E. Girard reviews Global Warming Facts and Our Future at the Marian Koshland Science Museum.

Green chemistry innovations have reduced industry’s impact on human health and the environment while also saving companies money.

In this week’s episode, Jori Lewis explores how New York City is trying to make it easier for residents to recycle their electronic waste.