Distillations

Episode 4 from the ‘Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race’ series.

Episode 3 from the ‘Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race’ series.

Restoring the legacy of a physical chemistry pioneer.

This episode of The Disappearing Spoon explores scientist John Calhoun’s mouse utopia and what it can tell us about the ways we impose lessons for society onto lab experiments.

Or will the scientist’s 200th birthday be his last hurrah?

This Disappearing Spoon episode explores how the legendary gardener’s reputation as the patron saint of the American wilderness ignores his boozy origins.

The Disappearing Spoon has the story behind notorious surgeon Walter Freeman’s contempt for his father, failures with his sons, and obsession with lobotomies.

This episode of The Disappearing Spoon is the third in a three-part series on legendary physicists and their dumbest mistakes.

Learn about the physicist’s biggest-blunder-turned-greatest success in this episode of The Disappearing Spoon.

This episode of The Disappearing Spoon explores why the iconic physicist made an unbelievable error while hunting down criminals, and how you can avoid the same dumb mistake.

This episode of The Disappearing Spoon reveals how an obsession with crustaceans guided the naturalist toward his most consequential insights.

How an obsession with crustaceans guided the naturalist toward his most consequential insights.

A scientist pitted hard work and ingenuity against the constraints she faced as a Jewish woman.

Reconsidering the fate of an overlooked polio fighter.

What drove a blind biochemist to experiment with LSD?

Though often celebrated, the adventurous First Lady never received full credit for her scientific accomplishments.

When American women bought Marie Curie a vital gram of the element.

Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner navigated a life of science through war and peace.

During the War of 1870, astronomer Jules Janssen risked his life for scientific prestige and French patriotism.

An interview with author Sam Kean.

An interview with Wendy Zukerman, host of the Science Vs podcast.

Chemist Max Bredig’s race to save family and friends from catastrophe.

A lucky streak sends a meteorologist on the flight of a lifetime.

In the waning days of World War II, a psychiatrist raced across Germany to uncover the harrowing abuses of Nazi doctors.

After 150 years of scrutiny, scholars still misrepresent the doctor’s life and gender.

A recent collection showcases the famous and not-so-famous women who have left their mark on the periodic table.

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

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

Depicting the everyman of the scientific enterprise.

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.

A lesson in humility begets a scientific revolution.

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

Distillations talks to the 2019 Othmer Gold Medal winner 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.

Historian Ingrid Ockert makes a case for the spoken word.

Distillations talks to the biochemist about the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, the tool’s promise, and dangers of its misuse.

How did a chemist from Philadelphia wind up a Soviet spy?

For centuries women have been looking at the stars despite earthly obstacles.

Why emphasizing intellectual achievement and scientific “genius” harms scientists with intellectual disabilities—and the rest of us.

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?

What possibilities might we be ignoring when we unquestioningly privilege sight as the primary pathway to knowledge about the natural world?

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

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

Through fame, controversy, and peril Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley’s bond endured.

What it means to be the chief curiosity correspondent at the Field Museum in Chicago.

How John Dalton’s early atomic theory led to the Science History Institute’s logo.

The story behind a rare work in our collection by the father of the periodic table.

The woman beside the father of chemistry.

William Herschel had a conflicted relationship with his biggest creation.

Escape is only the first challenge.

A painting bears the mark of Nazi brutality but also speaks to our capacity for kindness and bravery.

Computers have always been central to NASA’s accomplishments: they just used to be women. 

The jogging craze of the 1970s required a change of equipment.

A discovery by Indian scientist and statesman Meghnad Saha revealed the nature of stars.

Filippo Marinetti thought he could change Italian society through its collective belly. 

In Silicon Valley’s renegade days, a hardheaded Texan chased dreams of a flying car.

The first climate change believer.

An addition to our collections reveals the mark a mysterious American alchemist made on Isaac Newton and other early chemists.

Focusing on learning the facts may impede real learning, argues chemist and education advocate Bruce Alberts. Read what else he has to say in our interview.

An unusual relic offers a fuller picture of a chemist’s life and work.

Inventor Charles Babbage drew inspiration from an unusual source for his analytical engine.

Alex Wellerstein introduces us to the strange world of nuclear secrecy.

Albert Edelfelt broke the rules when he painted his friend Louis Pasteur in the scientist’s natural element.

The forgotten life of the scoundrel who created modern concrete.

Despite embargoes, nationalistic rivalry, and mistrust, the Napoleonic Wars were a time when enemies shared their science, owing largely to the efforts of one man.

Many Soviet scientists have been forgotten, even in their own countries. Buried Glory digs up some of these scientists.

Nikola Tesla’s career epitomizes the scientist as showman.

Edward Robinson Squibb helped set the standard for medicines in the 19th century.

Faced with political opposition to his work, the Czech chemist created the first wearable soft contact lens using a set of toys, a hot plate, and a gramophone motor.

Scientists are known to be dedicated to accuracy. But sometimes, as in the case of Francesco Redi, a sense of humor can lead one astray.

Katharine Burr Blodgett was the first female scientist hired by General Electric. Her work was truly invisible, deliberately so.

The story of a man who wanted to make the United States a healthier place and the sometimes fuzzy line between science and quackery.

Harold Urey was a Nobel Prize–winning chemist, a successful explorer of Earth’s deep past, and a public figure. So why did Urey describe himself as a frightened man?

In space no one can hear ice scream! For more than 100 years scientists have been discovering and creating bizarre, exotic ices. Ices that can even burn a hole in you!

War left a lasting impression on early American chemist James Woodhouse. For one thing, it showed him that doctors needed a proper understanding of chemistry to save lives.

Many scientists devised periodic systems in the 1860s, but Dmitri Mendeleev is today recognized as the father of the periodic table. How did this Russian provincial come to possess one of the most famous names in science?

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?

Regina Lee Blaszczyk reviews Nicholas de Monchaux’s Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo.

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

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.

On May 1, 1915, Clara Immerwahr Haber sat down at her desk to write farewell letters to friends and family.

Chemistry Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann is having a lot of fun crossing back and forth over the borders of science and literature.

Michael Gordin reviews Mary Jo Nye’s Michael Polanyi and His Generation.

Deborah Harkness is a historian of science who also writes fantasy novels in which vampires, witches, alchemy, and other wondrous creations are found.

The day Paul Lauterbur brought his Nobel medal to an elementary school.

Joseph Black, one of the first to realize that air was composed of many gases, isolated carbon dioxide, discovered latent heat, and contributed to the Industrial Revolution and the intellectual life of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The feud between William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy over the newly discovered element thallium rested on the very definition of discovery.

For more than 30 years chemist James Curtis Booth successfully oversaw quality and minimized waste at the U.S. Mint. Then three bars of silver bullion disappeared.

At the end of World War II chemist Charles Phelps Smyth chased down German nuclear scientists and the equipment they left behind.

A 1904 caricature from Vanity Fair is a striking example of the role images played in creating the Marie Curie myth.

Jennifer Dionisio reviews Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie—A Tale of Love and Fallout.

Charles Herty’s vision of a self-reliant America kicked off the American chemical industry. He traveled the United States championing a national approach to chemistry, calling on American businesses, government, and universities.

In 1959, only two years after getting his PhD, future Nobel laureate Marshall Nirenberg proposed to probe the genetic code. The only problem? He had no experience in the two fields at the forefront of this investigation.

In the so-called Hamel Catastrophe of 1820, a scientific expedition lost three local guides after the entire party fell 1,200 feet in an avalanche.

Michael Bycroft reviews Michael Hunter’s biography of Robert Boyle.

Susan Solomon has led expeditions in Antarctica, proposed the now-accepted theory about the role of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in creating the ozone hole over Antarctica, received the National Medal of Science, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

David Sarnoff wanted to be a journalist; instead he created commercial broadcasting and helped kick off the color revolution in television.

Chemist John William Draper took the first photographs of the moon and brought science into history.

For brothers William and Lawrence Knox, earning PhDs in chemistry was not enough to overcome discrimination. 

When Jane Marcet wrote Conversations on Chemistry, she had little idea it would introduce Michael Faraday into the world of science.

What linked Nobel laureate William Ramsay and famed illustrator Leslie Ward?