Distillations | Science History Institute

In our next episode we're continuing our three-part series on the history of opioid addiction treatment in the United States. And we're going back to the early 1960s, when the foundations for our modern opioid addiction treatment system were being built--starting with a controversial drug rehabilitation program called Synanon. Tune in to our next episode, Synanon and the Tunnel Back to the Human R...

Our current devastating opioid crisis is unprecedented in its reach and deadliness, but it's not the first such epidemic the United States has experienced or tried to treat. In fact, it's the third.  Treating America's Opioid Addiction is a three-part series that investigates how we've understood and treated opioid addiction over more than a century. Through the years we've categorized opioid addi...

We're hard at work on our next season. Listen to the first episode on August 21st!

If you live in Los Angeles, or even if you've just visited, you know about smog. But what might surprise you is that a half-century ago the city's air quality was more unbearable, even though the city had far fewer cars. In the final installment of our three-part series on environmental success stories, we tell you about Los Angeles's caveat-filled triumph over smog. The battle started in the 1940...

Tune in to the next episode of Distillations  on June 26!

Remember acid rain? If you were a kid in the 1980s like our hosts were, the threat of poison falling from the sky probably made some kind of impression on your consciousness. But thanks to the work of scientists, government, the media, and the pope—that's right, the pope—the problem was fixed! Well, mostly fixed is probably more accurate. This complicated story spans 27 years, six U.S. presidents,...

Tune in to the next episode of Distillations  on May 22!

If you were around in the 1980s, you probably remember the lurking fear of an ominous hole in the sky. In the middle of the decade scientists discovered that a giant piece of the ozone layer was disappearing over Antarctica, and the situation threatened us all. The news media jumped on the story. The ozone layer is like the earth's sunscreen: without it ultraviolet rays from the sun would cause al...

They're at the grocery checkout. They kill cancer cells. They're in pointers that drive cats crazy and in the fiber networks that connect us to the internet. Lasers are so ubiquitous it's hard to imagine a world without them. So you'd think we would know who the inventor was, right? Turns out it's not so easy. There's the guy who wrote down the initial idea, two other guys who got a patent for it,...

Yoga pants are having a moment. And while they're not new, they've moved beyond the gym and yoga studio into nearly every corner of our lives. This so-called athleisure wear trend has made a lot of people happy. "Once I wore [yoga pants], I never wore jeans again if I could help it," says Sage Roundtree, a yoga instructor from North Carolina. But as comfy as the trend is, it has made a lot of peop...

Every aspiring chemist has heard of Boyle's law—the equation that relates the pressure of a gas to its volume. But even if you know about Robert Boyle himself, it's not likely you've heard of his sister, even though she probably talked him through many of his ideas. Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615–1691), had a lifelong influence on her famous younger brother, natural philosopher Robert Boyle....

As you ponder which shiny new gadgets to put in your children's stockings this holiday season, beware of the story of the Abbott family, whose lives were forever changed after a little too much screen time. Distillations  brings you a live performance of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt." Originally titled "The World the Children Made," it's a science-fiction tale about the dangers of our gro...

It's one of the most bizarre episodes in American food history: when butter and margarine were at war. What you choose to spread on your toast might seem like a boring subject, but it turns out to be fascinating and sometimes hilarious. Margarine's history began with French emperor Napoleon III, a French chemist, and some sheep's stomachs, and went on to include heated courtroom debates, our first...

Baby horses and giraffes walk soon after they're born, and they can feed and take care of themselves pretty quickly, too. A one-year-old person, on the other hand, is basically helpless. But humans go on to live much longer than most other mammals, and scientists have long been trying to piece together why this is the case. One theory, called the grandmother hypothesis, claims that grandmas are th...

Though they lived decades apart, Adolphe Dessauer and Abdelwahhab Azzawi share similar stories. They were both esteemed physicians who faced violence and persecution in their home countries. They both sought refuge abroad and found safety, only to find themselves facing a new struggle—getting permission to practice medicine in their new homes. Dessauer, a Jewish doctor, fled Germany for the United...

There are no parents in the world who want to see their child sick. Often the illness is no big deal—you follow doctor's orders and your kid gets better soon. But what do you do when your child is really sick, and it's because of decisions the founders of your religion made more than 300 years ago? And what do you do when the medical solutions seem to run counter to that very same religion? This i...

On April 22, 2017, more than one million people in 600 cities around the world took to the streets in the name of science. Many were scientists themselves, and quite a few donned lab coats. Some were protesting for the first time. It was an unusual sight perhaps, but science has never been immune to politics. "If we could imagine angels doing science maybe it wouldn't be political," says Liz Lopat...

There was a time when tattoos were taboo, and you thought long and hard before getting one. Today 20 percent of American adults are inked. Tattoos just don't carry the stigma they once did—unless it's a particular kind of tattoo, in a particular place on the body. Fortunately, as our penchant for getting tattoos has grown, so has our ability to get rid of them. In the 1960s researchers started exp...

Most of us are content to use our existing five senses to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch our way through the world. But an increasing number of people called biohackers are not satisfied with watching the everyday brilliance of a sunset or petting a silky kitten. They want infrared vision and electromagnetic fingertips. "Why wouldn't I want to add one more sense to the ones I already have and...

For as long as humans have been around they've worried about their smell. "That's why we've had perfumes for as long as we've had people," says Cari Castee l , a CHF research fellow studying the history of deodorant. But, Casteel says, "it wasn't until the late 19th, early 20th century that the technology and the chemistry catches up to what people want." Today most Americans don't give a second t...

We all know hydration is important to health, but many people find water boring to drink. Juice and Coke aren't boring, but they aren't very healthy either. One way to transform water into a more exciting drink is to add bubbles. For centuries carbonated water from natural springs was used as a medicine. Now lifestyle and health concerns have combined to drive fizzy water's renewed popularity. Joi...

The sports bra is omnipresent in today's sports landscape. But the current iteration of this nifty item is less than 40 years old, and it arrived with a serendipitous origin story. For this episode of Distillations we talked to Lisa Lindahl , an entrepreneur from Vermont, who in 1979 patented what was to become the modern-day sports bra. It's a story about a runner who wanted running to be more co...

Our producer is pregnant. For the past nine months people have asked what her birth plan is, which to her seems like asking what kind of weather she had planned for her wedding day. "All of a sudden my life was full of these terms: natural , medicated , doula , epidural , and it quickly became clear that there was a great debate—and I was supposed to choose a side."  We wanted to know when this co...

Over the past year we've brought you stories about tacos, taxidermy, and DDT. But   at the same time we've been thinking about and researching   medicine—specifically, how outsiders to the field have helped change the ways doctors practice. Join us to find out how philosophers, transgender patients, and Jehovah's Witnesses have influenced health care in the United States over the past few decades....

Now that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs recognizes post-traumatic stress disorder as a significant issue among veterans, they've uncovered another problem—there aren't enough therapists to go around. Virtual reality experts at the University of Southern California have a solution: robots. Reporter Anna Stitt explains how advocates see these "therapy bots" as enhancing the field of therapy...