Posts By David Levin

I’m a chemical engineer and chemist by training, and I use those skills to find new ways to clean contaminated water. You can physically remove some pollutants with filters or …
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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 …
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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 …
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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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