Distillations magazine

Caroline Hampton and the forgotten origins of the first personal protective equipment.

How a 19th-century invention could save lives today.

The successes and shortcomings of the first Earth Day in 1970 still reverberate.

After transforming the periodic table should the promising young scientist have been allowed to fight in World War I?

In the fight against breast cancer, entrenched interests and outmoded ideas may be hurting patients.

The rise, fall, and resurrection of the humble leech.

Will stigma and cost undermine the therapy’s promise?

Historian Bruce Moran reveals the life of an itinerant doctor whose work influenced modern science.

What happens when an earth-shattering discovery runs up against the scientifically impossible?

Tracing the immense misery wreaked by the mosquito.

When New York’s poor revolted against the city’s grave-robbing medical establishment.

The covert politics behind American efforts to establish scientific freedom around the world.

A fighter pilot’s tragic flight into a nuclear explosion leads to the discovery of two elements.

Rare earth elements make modern devices faster, brighter, and lighter, but it will take the creaky gears of government to make their production cleaner and more equitable.

In the 1960s RCA created the world’s first liquid-crystal displays. How did the company fail to cash in on one of the modern world’s most ubiquitous technologies?

In the late 1960s an international contingent of psychiatrists took up a monumental task: making schizophrenia mean the same thing to doctors around the world.

It’s one thing to make a scientific discovery, but making it count is another thing entirely.

The transfermium elements—the fleeting, lab-made substances that populate the end of the periodic table—have a history built on pride and acrimony.