How a steam-powered automobile in 1869 snuffed out the life of the brilliant female naturalist and astronomer Mary Ward.

What a bizarre psychological disorder can teach us about memory, human nature, and our sense of who we are.

Scientists know how other animals’ bodies will change in warmer climates, but how will human beings respond?

The life of chimney sweeps was nasty, poor, brutish, filthy dirty, and usually short, thanks to a rare cancer of the g******s.

The long, wacky, and surprisingly thought-provoking history of trying animals in human courts.

An interview with Sam Kean about his latest book, The Icepick Surgeon.

Vox's Unexplainable podcast interviews Distillations about how Alzheimer’s research has stubbornly focused on a single theory for decades.

Distillations sat down with Jen Daine and Cait Parnell, the hosts of the All Souls podcast, Chamomile and Clove; art historian Stephenie McGucken; and medievalist actor, journalist, and author Sarah Durn to talk about the series’ alchemical roots, the material culture in the TV show, and how the book’s found-family theme mirrors the fandom.

Since humans have been living—and inevitably dying—we’ve also been trying to figure out how not to die. Or at least how to keep the party going a little longer.

Jeremiah McCall is a history teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School and the author of Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary School. He talked to Distillations about what it's like to use video games in his history classes, the criteria he uses in choosing games, and why he likes his students to question the media they are consuming.

The pandemic made gamers out of many Americans, including our producer, Rigoberto Hernandez. He played a lot of historical video games and it got him thinking: can you learn history from video games even though they are obviously fiction.Throughout history there have been many moral panics about people consuming historical fiction and taking what they read and watch as fact, so how do video games stack up? It turns out that they can empower players in better ways than TV shows, films, and books.

Anna Reeser is a historian of technology and Laila McNeil is a historian of science. Together they co-founded and are editors-in-chief of Lady Science, an independent magazine about women, gender, history, and popular culture of science. Now the duo has a new book titled Forces of Nature: The Women Who Changed Science. They talked to us about moving beyond biographies, how women who had knowledge about the natural world are suspect, and reintegrating women’s history into the mainstream.

Our approach to fighting wildfires is a fantasy, and it’s making them even more catastrophic.

Ghost hunters on television all seem to have a common goal: to prove that ghosts are real using sophisticated, yet inexact technology. Colin Dickey, the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, says this is not an accident. The relationship between technology and ghosthunters is as old as the telegraph. But Dickey is not interested in proving they are real; he is fascinated with what the ghost stories we tell reveal about our society.

The 19th century was a time of rapid technological leaps: the telegraph, the steam boat, the radio were invented during this century. But this era was also the peak of spiritualism: the belief that ghosts and spirits were real and could be communicated with after death. Seances were all the rage. People tried to talk to their dead loved ones, using Ouija boards and automatic writing. Although it might seem contradictory, it's not a coincidence that this was all happening at the same time.

When an invisible threat plagued rural 19th-century New England, the evidence pointed to the supernatural.

This summer leave reality behind and join Distillations for an entire season about fantasy! We're talking vampires! Ghosts! Witches! And we promise, it all has to do with the history of science. Season launches on June 29.

In this episode we talk to Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, a biotech company that developed one of the three emergency-approved COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. Bancel reflects on the development timeline of the vaccine: from learning about the virus while reading the Wall Street Journal in 2019 to the moment he finally got his own shot at a Moderna facility. He talks about the promise of mRNA and what’s ahead for Moderna.

In the 1700s human dissection was a big taboo—people feared that it would leave their bodies mangled on Judgment Day, when God would raise the dead. As a result, government officials banned most dissections. This led to some unintended consequences, most notably a shortage of bodies for anatomists to dissect. To meet the heightened demand, a new profession emerged: grave-robbers. These so-called resurrectionists dug up the bodies of poor people to sell to anatomists, which led to riots in the...

How a rogue archaeologist in Peru found indisputable evidence of something previously unthinkable—ancient neurosurgery.

How an early 20th century doctor pitted one scourge (malaria) against another (syphilis).

The ivory-billed woodpecker is sometimes called the Lord God bird, a nickname it earned because that’s what people cried out the first time they ever saw one: “Lord God, what a bird.” Even though the last confirmed sighting was in the 1930s, birders have been claiming they have seen the Lord God bird throughout the years, turning it into a myth. The sad part is it didn’t need to be this way. And it’s all Hitler’s fault. As crazy as it sounds, the ivory-billed woodpecker was one of last...

If Ted Talks were around in the early 1990s, Horace Fletcher would have given his fair share of them. Fletcher was a health reformer who thought people didn’t chew their food nearly enough. He believed that most swallowed food way too quickly. This had all sorts of detrimental health consequences, he said, including nasty bowel movements.​​ So he over-chewed his food. He once chewed a green onion 722 times before he let himself swallow it.

And what does it have to do with the unusual chemistry of carbon?

The debut of the female birth control pill in 1960 was revolutionary. . But the pill had many unpleasant and even dangerous side effects. In fact, some doctors argue that it wouldn’t win government approval today. So why haven’t scientists tried to create a birth control pill for men? It turns out they have. In the 1950s scientists created a really good one. But it had one problem—you can’t drink alcohol when you take it.