David Levine

Jan 12, 2025 | timesunion.com | David Levine

Last month, Orange County provided the dateline for an international news story. Homeowners in Scotchtown saw what they first thought was an old baseball emerging from their backyard lawn. A little digging revealed it was in fact two huge teeth. They contacted Cory Harris, professor of anthropology and sociology at SUNY Orange, who knew immediately they had once belonged to a mastodon.

Jan 1, 2025 | timesunion.com | David Levine

There was nothing unusual about the weather in the Capital Region and Hudson Valley in the weeks leading up to the holiday season of 1948. Temperatures were seasonably cold and the ground was frozen after a few below-zero nights. There was little to no snow on the ground. But on Dec. 29, a moisture-filled low-pressure system moved into New England from the southwest, where it was blocked by high pressure over the North Atlantic and stalled. Temperatures rose, and it began to rain. And rain. And rain.

Dec 22, 2024 | timesunion.com | David Levine

In October, the latest battle in a century-long skirmish between the Catskills and New York City over water ended up a win for the upstaters.

Dec 6, 2024 | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | David Levine |Kevin Turner |James Pikul

1 Introduction Electroadhesion has emerged as an attractive strategy for programming stiffness in high-performance applications, including haptic interfaces,[1, 2] wearables,[3, 4] morphing structures,[5, 6] robotic exoskeletons,[7, 8] modular robotic teams,[9] and versatile grippers.[6, 10] In particular, electroadhesive clutches are promising candidates for such applications due to their low weight, fast response times, high flexibility, and low power consumption.[11] To date,...

Nov 20, 2024 | timesunion.com | David Levine

On page 931 of his 1,074-page biography of Ulysses S. Grant, author Ron Chernow drops an interesting, if relatively unimportant, local tidbit about the Civil War hero and 18th President of the United States. Grant was visiting a horse breeder’s farm in Goshen on Nov. 20, 1884, shortly after he had been diagnosed with the oral cancer that would take his life eight months later. The cancer had developed as a result of Grant’s legendary smoking habit.