Distillations magazine

A small Massachusetts town of knickknack makers helps mold the material world.

A Japanese gourmand discovers the fifth element of taste.

In the 1960s chemists created artificial turf. But are synthetic fields better than natural grass?

Fleischmann’s Yeast for Health campaign turned unappetizing blocks of fresh yeast into one of the first health-food fads by using brazen, relentless advertising marked by unverifiable claims and “scientific” language.

The story of electricity, danger, nationalism, advertising, and pollution in the lighting of the United States.

In the years following World War II, chemical companies sold not only products but a lifestyle.

In a time of rapid technological change and globalization, separating the fake from the real was not always easy. Sound familiar?

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.