Distillations magazine

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.

In the 1920s a pioneering journalist summoned the might of American women to revive a Nobelist’s career.

In the 1930s a pride- and faith-fueled dispute between two Nobel Prize–winning physicists spilled onto the front page of the New York Times.

To fight air pollution, officials first had to convince Californians that carmakers were the enemy, not cars.

In the last years of World War II a group of American scientists and soldiers raced to capture enemy physicists, sabotage Hitler’s nuclear ambitions, and do it all before their Soviet allies were any the wiser.

As officials spread disinformation, a deadly epidemic edged its way into the United States.

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.

Science writer Deborah Blum chronicles one chemist’s fight to bring order to a lawless food industry.

New forensics techniques are allowing researchers to solve historical mysteries based on the small traces we leave on everyday objects.

A lesson in humility begets a scientific revolution.

An engraving hints at the ways art and science were intertwined in the Age of Enlightenment.

In the 1980s workers in an English peat bog started unearthing bodies, the apparent victims of violence.

The biomedical researcher talks about her work using nanotechnology to detect and treat disease.

Movies and television shows like to portray scientists as lone geniuses. But scientists with disabilities know the reality is much more complex.