Distillations | Science History Institute

Shakespeare had a go at at the longest word in the English language with “honorific-abilitude-in-i-tat-i-bus.” If you play the game of stacking suffixes and prefixes together, you can get “antidisestablishmentarianism,” one letter longer for a total of 28 letters. But the longest word by far appeared in 1964 in Chemical Abstracts, a dictionary-like reference for chemists. The word describes a protein in what’s called the tobacco mosaic virus, and it runs 1,185 letters long. Besides being too long to write here, it tells us a lot about the unusual chemistry of carbon. Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer “Delamine” by Blue Dot Sessions. All other music composed by Jonathan Pfeffer.

The debut of the female birth control pill in 1960 was revolutionary. The combination of progesterone and estrogen allowed women to control their reproductive lives much more easily and effectively. 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. Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Music: Jean-Claude Risset - Mutations Peter B - The Growling Dog Hit Perry & Kingsley - Cosmic Ballad Charlie Hoistman - Ptpar(({|i|[i*8,Pbind(\scale,[0,2,4,7,9],\degree,Pseq(32.fib.fold(0,10),4)+(2*i+i)-10,\dur,1+2**i%2/6)]}!4).flat).play // #supercollider Régis Renouard Larivière - Contrée Raymond Scott - Lightworks Deerhoof - Despareceré Juk Suk Reet Meate - B3 (excerpt from Solo 1978/79) Ben Vida - Ssseeeeiiiiii Marmots - Sheath and Knife Tim Walters - play{({|k|({|i|y=SinOsc;y.ar(i*k*k,y.ar(i*k**i/[4,5])*Decay.kr(Dust.kr(1/4**i),y.ar(0.1)+1*k+i,k*999))}!8).product}!16).sum}//#supercollider Eva-Maria Houben - quatuor iv Young Marble Giants - Zebra Trucks All other music composed by Jonathan Pfeffer.

From the Disappearing Spoon, our new podcast! Radium was once the trendiest element in the world. It glowed alluringly in the dark and was hailed it as a medical panacea. It was also the basis of Marie Curie’s research—for which she won her second Nobel Prize in 1911. But by 1920 radium was scarce and its cost was eye-popping: one hundred thousand dollars per gram. When Curie’s research ground to a halt because of the expense, thousands of American women stepped in to raise money for the precious chemical element.

From our new podcast, the Disappearing Spoon: The so-called “Peking Man” fossils are some of the first ancient human remains discovered in mainland Asia. So when they disappeared during World War II, it was called one of the worst disasters in the history of archaeology. Now some archeologists claim to have tracked them down. The only problem is they’re underneath a parking lot. Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Original Music by Jonathan Pfeffer Wang Fan - Zero (from An Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music 1992-2008) Listening to the Pine-trees (from Chine / Musique Classique) Sarah Hennies – Fleas Wang Changcun - Through the Tide of Faces (from An Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music 1992-2008) Zhegu Fei (The Partridge) (from Chine / Musique Classique) All other music composed by Jonathan Pfeffer.

The Science History Institute has launched a second podcast! We've teamed up with New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean to bring you even more stories from our scientific past. Don’t worry, Distillations podcast isn’t going anywhere; we’re still producing the in-depth narrative-style episodes you know and love! We’ve just doubled your history of science listening pleasure. For the next 10 weeks we’ll bring you stories from the footnotes of the history of science, from the saga of the male birth control pill to this inaugural episode: how the smallpox vaccine made its way around the world before refrigeration. Amid all the logistical headaches of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, one huge challenge involves the cold chain. The cold chain is a network of freezers and refrigerators that keep vaccine doses at the consistently cold temperatures they need to stay viable. Though complicated, this is all doable in the 21st century. But how did the world’s very first vaccine, created for smallpox in 1796, make it around the world? Live carriers—specifically, orphan boys. Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer “Delamine” by Blue Dot Sessions "La Flecha Incaia" by El Conjunto Sol Del Peru. All other music composed by Jonathan Pfeffer.  

Did you know that Gandhi hated iodine? Or that Silicon Valley was almost called Germanium Valley? Our producer Rigoberto Hernandez talked about these stories and more with Sam Kean, author of The Disappearing Spoon, a book about the stories behind the periodic table. The New York Times best-selling author and regular Distillations magazine contributor described how Dmitri Mendeleev’s publisher accidentally shaped the periodic table, why gallium is a popular element for pranksters, and what inspired the title of his book. Kean, Sam. The Disappearing Spoon. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2010. Credits Host: Elisabeth Berry Drago & Alexis Pedrick Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Original music by Jonathan Pfeffer

Distillations is hard at work on our next season. It’s not quite ready, but we have a treat for you in the meantime. We interviewed Wendy Zukerman, the host and executive producer of one of our favorite podcasts, Science Vs. In normal times the show pits facts against fads—they talk about everything from detox diets to the supposed benefits of Cannabidiol, or CBD. Since early 2020, however, they’ve been reporting about the Coronavirus pandemic. But they actually started even earlier than that—in the fall of 2019 they coincidentally produced an episode all about global pandemics. We talked with Wendy about whether or not she's psychic, the challenges of pivoting to news reporting, and why it's so important for Science Vs. to tell history of science stories. The latest season of Science Vs. (which is not about COVID-19) just launched on March 4! Credits Host: Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Original music by Jonathan Pfeffer

As the pandemic began raging again this fall we talked with nurse Linda Ruggiero about what it's like to be on the front lines for a second wave. She talks about how treatment has changed, what we still don't know about the disease, and how every nurse she knows is suffering from PTSD.  Host: Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Photograph of Linda Ruggiero by Kyle Cassidy.

We've collaborated with Philadelphia photographer Kyle Cassidy to tell the stories of our city's essential workers. This fall his large-scale portraits of nurses, sanitation workers, Instacart shoppers, mask-makers, and delivery drivers will be on display on the exterior of the Science History Institute, in Old City Philadelphia. Find out more at sciencehistory.org/pandemic. Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Music by Blue Dot Sessions: "Arlan Vale," "Alum Drum," "Setting Pace," "Kalstead," "Drone Pine," and "Raskt Landsby."

Outer space is crowded. Satellites, pieces of rocket, and stuff that astronauts left behind, such as cameras and poop, are just floating around. This space junk can pose a threat to our communication systems. In this episode we talk with Lisa Ruth Rand, a fellow at the Science History Institute, about her upcoming book on space junk. She tells us how space weather—that’s right, there’s space weather—can have an effect on what falls on Earth. She also talks about how our views on space debris reveal our attitudes back on Earth and how space junk truly made the space age global. Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: James Morrison Resource List Interview with Marie Ruman. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, January 24, 1978. Judd, Bridget. “NASA’s Skylab met its demise in Australia more than 40 years ago—but was it really an accident?” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 30, 2020.  The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, “Cosmos 954.” January 25, 1978, American Archive of Public Broadcasting.  Rand, Lisa Ruth. “Orbital Decay: Space Junk and the Environmental History of Earth’s Planetary Borderlands.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2016.  Rand, Lisa Ruth. “Wasted Space: The History of Orbiting Junk.” Science History Institute, December 5, 2019. Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. Speech at the House of Commons of Canada, January 24, 1978.