Distillations magazine

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

Often dismissed as a “trash fish,” the porgy anchors black maritime culture.

Modern agricultural practices are unsustainable. Is tree farming the answer?

The Bronx Zoo’s strange obsession with an even stranger bird.

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

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

A centuries-old sailor’s hack enters the ecologist’s toolkit.

Calculating the automobile’s grisly impact on wildlife.

Space toilets and the lessons of living in closed environments.

How ancient (and not so ancient) cultures thought about water purity and contamination.

With their creeping, bloodsucking ways, bedbugs continue to mock human superiority.

The groundbreaking ecologist showed that the biological diversity within a stream can be used to diagnose its health.

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

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.

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.

Scientists William Vogt and Norman Borlaug took very different approaches to feeding the world.