Posts By David Levin

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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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