Distillations magazine

Unexpected Stories from Science’s Past

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

Old photo of women on a factory floor surrounded by munitions shells
Inventions & Discoveries

Picric Acid’s Volatile History

A mutable chemical and our collective choices.

Colorized illustration showing dated depictions of dinosaurs in a stylized setting
Arts & Culture

What Doomed Central Park’s Dinosaurs?

Historians unmask the villain who killed off New York’s Paleozoic Museum.

Man in hardhat and work clothes turning valve on a machine
Environment

Water and Power

Could a century-old aqueduct point the way to Los Angeles’s clean energy future?

Black and white photo of a man looking through a large viewfinder
Inventions & Discoveries

We’re Going to Work Miracles

The failed promises of Project Plowshare.

Color photo of a cow standing in a sunny Alpine pasture
Environment

A Tragedy with No End

Why does Garrett Hardin’s pessimistic fable haunt our collective imagination?

Color photograph of a vivid aurora in the sky over a beach
Inventions & Discoveries

That Time Demons Possessed the Telegraph

Solar storms from long ago have become the delight of some scientists—and the dread of others.

Black and white photo of a seated older man and standing older woman in front of a microscope
Health & Medicine

21 Years, 7,600 Tests

Mary Papanicolaou, the woman behind the man behind the Pap smear.

Renaissance oil painting woman holding a mirror while another looks on
Early Science & Alchemy

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.

black and white photo of a seated man in a lab coat
Health & Medicine

Joe Hin Tjio Counts Chromosomes

A basic scientific error hid in plain sight for decades until an Indonesian geneticist spent Christmas break on a lab bender.

Color illustration of a desert scene with a car in the foreground and storm clouds on the horizon
Environment

Everyday Monsoons

Washes and other gaps in the Sonoran Desert.

Roadside sculpture showing a skeleton man walking a skeleton dinosaur
Inventions & Discoveries

The Dinosaurs Died in Spring

Science that ushered in a new epoch also revealed stunning details from Earth’s distant past.

Woman inside ocean exploring suit in open air
Environment

Sylvia Earle and the Call of the Deep

Adventure and tangled interests under the sea.

Color illustration of a man and women in South Asian attire
Inventions & Discoveries

Matchmaking in Colonial India

An inconspicuous technology sparks revolution on the subcontinent.

Daguerreotype of old man in royal clothing with infant child
People & Politics

The Eclipse That Killed a King (and May Have Saved a Kingdom)

How the scientific prowess of King Mongkut of Siam helped stave off European incursion.

Drug packaging with label
Health & Medicine

Dreams and Nightmares

Oxycodone’s early years.

Black and white photo of girl with a cotton plant
Environment

Rings of Fire

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

Color photo of two men in suits, one without a shirt, photographed walking in the dark
People & Politics

Valery Fabrikant and Science’s Ethical Limits

Is it right to publish research from an unrepentant murderer?

Engraving of young Victorian woman crouch at feet of seated older woman
Health & Medicine

How Notorious Abortionist Madame Restell Built a Drug Empire

Desperate women, mistreated by the 19th century’s medical establishment, risked black-market remedies and the wrath of Anthony Comstock’s moralizing thugs.