Distillations magazine

Author and illustrator Jonathan Fetter-Vorm tells the stories of science through comics and graphic novels.

Silly Putty’s serious past.

Watch historians re-create a recipe for imitation coral, a popular material in early modern jewelry and home décor.

Can a parasite in your cat’s litter box take control of your mind?

Before today’s cell-phone, laptop, and TV screens, there was a whiskey advertisement.

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.

Albert Edelfelt broke the rules when he painted his friend Louis Pasteur in the scientist’s natural element.

When William Aspdin stumbled on the secret to modern concrete, it was the first and one of the few fortuitous steps in an unsteady life.

For more than 2,000 years human ingenuity has turned natural and synthetic poisons into weapons of war.

A tour through the history of radioisotopes, used to study and treat disease and to unlock the secrets of DNA and photosynthesis.

Designers of the 1950s took up the atom and turned it into a fashion icon.

John Hughes worked his way through uncounted pig brains to find the human body’s natural painkiller.

In 1916 the United States sent its first official observer to the trenches of Europe, where he found a new kind of warfare.

During the Napoleonic Wars one man in particular kept scientific knowledge flowing between enemies.

In the early 20th century, chemists prophesied a future that seemed both surreal and somehow within reach.

A story of horror, deadly medicine, and the Ku Klux Klan.