Posts By David Levin

A lot of my work involves studying a biomolecule called the amyloid beta protein, which is one of a variety of things in the brain that we think lead to …
Read More

As more states legalize marijuana consumption and sales, it creates a major challenge for public health researchers. We don’t know what the full effects of legalization will be or the …
Read More

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer

There are lots of sophisticated prosthetic devices on the market for people who have lost limbs, but no matter how well they replicate the intricate …
Read More

As a geologist, I study the mechanics of earthquakes. Right now, we have a good sense of how quakes happen — we know how the continental plates are moving in …
Read More

What’s the universe made of? That’s the overarching question to everything I do. We know from astrophysical observations that it’s mostly made up of dark matter and dark energy, but …
Read More

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer

One of the big problems in my field is that the early stages of heart valve disease are a mystery. Even people who have regular …
Read More

Is there life anywhere else other than Earth, either now or in the past? When I was a graduate student some 20–30 years ago, that was really just a …
Read More

Synthetic biology is really an engineering discipline, but what we can’t do right now is engineer large organisms. What if we could create a snake to go into rubble …
Read More

At Rice, one of the country’s most recognized research and teaching institutions, we talk a lot about what we know — our scholarly expertise and the brilliant faculty, staff …
Read More