Distillations magazine

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

The strange, sometimes sickening things we’ve done to understand what goes on inside our guts.

The latest painkiller revival has left a trail of bodies, with no end in sight.

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

A long-running genetics project in Siberia helps us understand how we made man’s best friend.

A historian of science goes searching for meaning in synthetic life.

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

The good and bad of an everlasting invention.

Fermentation is the key to many of the lifesaving drugs we have today.

A misunderstanding of hippo physiology gave rise to one of the most widespread and pointless practices in medical history.

One war made him the most powerful man in science; the war that followed took that power away.

The line between science and art was not always so stark.

Why the recent findings of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine are enlightening, even if they aren’t surprising.

After the Vietnam War a mysterious yellow substance rained down from the skies of Southeast Asia. Was it a chemical weapon or something stranger?

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

Warfarin started life as a rat poison, and for all its success the anticoagulant remains as dangerous as its origin suggests.

Where do new drugs come from? And why do so many fail?

Tattoos are more than decoration. But what do you do when the way you look no longer matches who you are?