Distillations magazine

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.

Foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking eccentric Harry R. Truman became a folk hero for refusing to evacuate his home in the months before Mount St. Helens erupted. Where did he go once it did?

Drought drove American pursuit of desalination in the mid-20th century. Now a changing climate has compelled nations around the world to embrace the double-eged technology.

Why resources spent building a colony on the red planet would be a waste of money.

Eleanor Roosevelt thanks a chemical engineering firm in Philadelphia for manufacturing water for the king and queen of England on their visit to America.

City dwellers of the 19th century were dogged by a foul terror: miasma.

The good and bad of an everlasting invention.

To slow global warming scientists have tried schemes both simple and bizarre to bottle up cow burps.

Making eco-friendly cement is easy; the hard part comes later.