Distillations magazine

For thousands of years silk symbolized wealth and style. But in the 1930s DuPont gave Americans the next best thing.

Do you think of poison ivy as a scurrilous weed to be avoided at all costs? Think again! There was a time when the daring and curious found promise in poison ivy and its rash-inducing relatives.

In the early 1950s French physician Henri Laborit experienced a moment of serendipity that would fundamentally alter the landscape of psychiatry and mental illness.

How did the Hanford nuclear facility become one of America’s most vexing environmental challenges? Jennifer Weeks explores the history and future of the site.

Coal fueled the cities of the Industrial Revolution. But coal did far more than power steam engines and heat homes.

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.

Wars are often fought over resources, but as far as we know only one war has ever been fought over fertilizer.

In 1667 Margaret Cavendish was the first woman allowed to visit the all-male bastion of the Royal Society, a newly formed scientific society. Who was this woman?

Meet J. J. Thomson, who disproved Einstein’s dictum that the man “who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.”

Discover alchemy, the secret science!

In the 17th century, experimentalists were only beginning to understand the connections among blood, respiration, and air.

When Communist East Germany built a wall across Berlin, it created two different cities, two different countries, and for scientists two different careers.

As Coca-Cola’s popularity spread in the United States in the 1920s, rabbis around the country asked, is Coke kosher?

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

Jābir ibn Hayyan, whose name is inextricably bound to the foundations of alchemy, is a man of mystery.

Neon is a dull and invisible gas until it’s trapped in a tube and zapped with electricity. Literally pulled out of thin air, it became a symbol of progress and an essential component of the electronic age.

Reatha Clark King wanted to be a research chemist, so she made the journey from the segregated South to Illinois. At the University of Chicago her dreams came true.

Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661) is an acknowledged landmark of science. But the book’s reputation is based less on what it is than on what it is perceived to be.